[ad_1]
An epidemic of the deadly Ebola virus in two provinces of eastern Congo has spread to an important international shopping center with nearly a million residents, said Wednesday. Congolese health officials.
Health authorities in Butembo, a town near neighboring Uganda, said they confirmed that a man dead at Butembo University Hospital had tested positive for the virus.
The Congolese Ministry of Health reported that the man had been in contact with an Ebola patient in Beni, a town located about 40 kilometers north of Butembo, where nearly 20 or so Ebola victims have fled the south.
The Ministry of Health said it prepared hospital staff to deal with potential cases of Ebola. Ndjoloko Tambwe Bathe, who heads the response for the Congo Ministry of Health, went to the city on Wednesday to set up a full intervention team. The ministry is setting up an Ebola treatment unit, the fifth established in the region since the beginning of the epidemic.
The most recent outbreak of Ebola began in July in North Kivu province, home to about 8 million people and about 1 million internally displaced refugees. So far, health officials have identified 127 probable and confirmed cases. Eighty-seven people died.
Most of these cases occurred in the health district of Mabalako, where the first cases were reported in late July after a woman's funeral in the town of Mangina. Several family members who attended the funeral, who probably washed and dressed the woman's body to prepare her for life after death, developed symptoms later.
Several probable and confirmed cases have been identified in the neighboring province of Ituri, north of North Kivu.
Public health officials had already worried about the spread of the virus once it reached Beni, a town of about 250,000 that also has close commercial links with Uganda. Now that they have reached Butembo, these officials have said that their fears have increased.
In the weeks since the beginning of the epidemic, world public health officials and nongovernmental organizations have raced with hundreds of epidemiologists and technicians and millions of dollars in humanitarian aid in the region . These officials have identified at least 4,300 people who have been in contact with someone infected with the Ebola virus and more than half of these people remain under surveillance in case they develop symptoms.
Public health officials also feared that the security situation in North Kivu province would prevent them from finding those who had been in contact with patients with Ebola. Ethnic violence and attacks by Islamist-based Islamist guerrillas have made some of these critical searches more difficult.
In an interview last week from Beni, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said the contact officers were largely convinced that they had identified virtually all those who could potentially be infected.
"The feeling is that we have resources in Mangina. It seems that future cases come from contacts, which is a good sign, "said Jasarevic. He said that the WHO teams had access to all villages where Ebola cases could be present.
The Congolese Ministry of Health said that an ongoing vaccination campaign for weeks had already reached 6,343 people, including more than 3,000 in Mabalako, nearly 2,000 in Beni and more than a thousand in Mandima. Front-line health workers and those who might come into contact with an Ebola sufferer have the highest priority for the new vaccine.
This is the second Ebola outbreak this year, during which the new vaccine was deployed. The vaccine, developed during the last days of an Ebola outbreak in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, was previously deployed in Equateur Province, about 750 miles west of North Kivu.
None of those who received the vaccine in Ecuador became ill afterwards.
Since the Ebola virus was first discovered in 1976, there have been 14 confirmed outbreaks, mainly in Congo – or, as it was then called, in Zaire. The epidemic in West Africa has killed more than 11,300 people, by far the deadliest of all epidemics. The last epidemic is already the ninth deadliest of its kind.
[ad_2]
Source link
