The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed the detection of the first Ebola virus case in Ivory Coast in more than 25 years, reported Reuters.
In a televised address, Ivory Coast’s Health Minister Pierre N’Gou Dimba said that health officials confirmed the case after testing samples from an 18-year-old female who traveled from Guinea. She had left Labe city in Guinea by road and arrived in Ivory Coast on Wednesday.
“This is an isolated and imported case,” Health Minister Dimba said in a statement.
The case has been detected about two months after Guinea declared the end of the latest Ebola outbreak that killed 12 people this year in the country. The WHO had previously alerted six countries neighboring Guinea — Ivory Coast, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Liberia — to boost testing and healthcare facilities to prepare for a possible outbreak.
There is, however, no evidence to establish any link between the Ebola case in Ivory Coast and the outbreak in Guinea, according to the WHO. It said that the connection between the cases can only be confirmed after investigation and genome sequencing.
“It is of immense concern that this outbreak has been declared in Abidjan, a metropolis of more than 4 million people,” Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, said in a statement.
She added that much of the world’s expertise in tackling Ebola is already present on the African continent.
Meanwhile, Ivory Coast’s Health Ministry said the health authorities have already started tracing contacts who came in contact with the Ebola patient but did not specify how many people interacted with her.
In related news, last week, Guinea’s health ministry reported the country’s first Marburg virus case, which is another kind of hemorrhagic fever with fatality rates of up to 88 percent depending on the strain. The health authorities have sent about 155 people into three weeks of quarantine.
