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On this photo taken on Saturday, July 13, 2019, health workers wearing protective clothing tend towards an Ebola victim held in an isolated cube in Beni, Congo, DRC. (Jérôme Delay / AP)
NAIROBI – The Congolese Ministry of Health confirmed the first case of Ebola in the city of Goma late Sunday night, which could be a major escalation for the epidemic in the country.
Goma is home to more than a million people and lies directly on the border between Congo and Rwanda, where tens of thousands of people walk daily.
The current Ebola epidemic is spreading in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri in Congo for almost a year. A small number of cases were confirmed but quickly contained in neighboring Uganda in June after a Congolese family sought treatment in that country.
With the arrival of the case in Goma, the virus is now present in two cities of more than one million inhabitants, Goma and Butembo.
At a high-level meeting of global health officials in Geneva, Switzerland, the head of the World Health Organization announced that he would again convene a group of scientists to determine if the epidemic now ranks among public health emergencies of international concern. unlock more resources to stop, but has already been denied three times.
The new case in Goma is a pastor who traveled from Butembo by bus, according to the Ministry of Health. The remaining 18 passengers on the bus are expected to receive an experimental vaccine that has been extensively proven. Then, health workers will follow all the contacts established by the confirmed case as well as all passengers.
[[[[The Ebola virus has been spreading for nearly a year in Congo. Officials are struggling to "reset" the answer. ]
"Because of the speed with which the patient was identified and isolated, and the identification of all other passengers of the bus coming from Butembo, the risk of spread in the rest of the city of Goma is weak, "the ministry said in a statement. .
The outbreak killed 1,665 people on Monday, while nearly 700 have survived the virus, which causes high fever and internal bleeding. Days with dozens of new cases are common, despite massive public health intervention in the affected area.
Health workers are concerned that some cases – or even entire chains of transmission – are in places inaccessible due to poor infrastructure or insecurity, making the scale of the epidemic difficult to measure completely.
The epidemic is also the scene of one of the longest and most violent conflicts in the Congo: a mosaic of ethnic militias, militia and forces aligned with the government.
The fighting has sometimes targeted the Ebola response, hampering it and causing outbreaks of new cases. Near the epicenter of the epidemic in the city of Beni on Monday, two health workers were killed by unknown assailants. Tedros Ghebreyesus, W.H.O. According to his boss, nearly 200 attacks against health workers have been perpetrated, killing seven people since January.
The current outbreak is the second most important after the 2013-2016 epidemic that has killed more than 11,300 people in West Africa.
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