The health officials have confirmed detecting a new case of Ebola in the remote, militia-controlled territory of Walikale, which is located hundreds of kilometres away from where previous cases near the border with Uganda and Rwanda occurred, reported Reuters.
Pinga, the village where the Ebola case was detected, lies about 150km (95 miles) northwest of Goma, one of the towns affected by the Ebola epidemic, and much further away from Butembo and Beni, the epicenter of the epidemic.
The presence of Ebola in yet another DRC zone has raised the risk of it spreading out of control.
Last week, the DRC health ministry confirmed the first Ebola cases in South Kivu. The first detected patient was a woman in her twenties who evaded movement controls to travel from the North Kivu town of Beni, the epicenter of the outbreak, to South Kivu’s capital Bukavu and then Mwenga. She died on Wednesday, and her infant son has been diagnosed with the virus and is receiving treatment.
A seven-year-old child became the second victim of the outbreak and succumbed to the virus on Sunday.
Claude Bahizire, communication officer of South Kivu’s provincial health division, said two other suspected cases have been detected and admitted to Bukavu’s transit centre. He added that the two women were in contact with the woman who died last week while she was staying in Bukavu on the way to Mwenga.
Ebola has already killed at least 1,900 people in Congo over the past year, the second biggest toll in the disease’s history. The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa had killed around 11,300 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
The efforts to contain the Ebola spread in Congo have not fetched desired results due to the region’s political instability, attacks on health workers, a highly mobile population and community mistrust and misinformation.
On Monday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief, made an appeal to the nine countries that share a border with Congo to show solidarity to stop the spread of Ebola.
“We now have an Ebola vaccine that is more than 97 percent effective and treatments that are more than 90 percent effective if used early enough,” Tedros said.
