By Peter Yeung
John Bompengo/AP/Shutterstock
A new outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus disease has emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), more than 1200 kilometres to the west of an early outbreak that has been spreading in the country since 2018. It is the 11th such incident in the DRC since the virus was first discovered in 1976.
As of 14 June, authorities have reported 14 confirmed infections and three probable cases of the haemorrhagic fever in and around the northwestern city of Mbandaka in Equateur province, resulting in 11 deaths to date.
The news comes less than two years since an outbreak of the disease ended in Equateur province in July 2018, and while the country’s tenth outbreak is ongoing across the eastern North Kivu and Ituri provinces, killing more than 2200. At the same time, the DRC is contending with the world’s largest measles outbreak and the spread of the coronavirus.
Advertisement
“The last outbreak in Equateur was quickly contained – in less than 3 months – and we will make all our efforts to ensure it is done again,” says Mary Stephen, at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Regional Office for Africa.
Stephen says that expertise and infrastructure built over the years will be invaluable in curbing the new outbreak, and that a programme of vaccinations, door-to-door education and providing mobile handwashing stations is already underway.
More than 2115 people, including 679 contacts, 1309 contacts of contacts, and 127 likely contacts have been vaccinated so far, she says. Over 108,000 people have been screened at control points between cities, she says.
The WHO has more than 20 staff on the ground supporting the Ministry of Health at Mbandaka, a major port city that sits on the Congo River, close to the border with the neighbouring Republic of the Congo.
“We have a lot of experience in tackling these outbreaks,” says Eteni Longondo, the DRC’s health minister. “But that does not mean we are taking this disease any less seriously. It requires a complex system of epidemiologists, surveillance, infection prevention, risk assessment and contact tracing.”
Longondo says health workers are being given refresher courses before being deployed into Equateur and that personal protective equipment (PPE) from previous outbreaks is already in place for use.
The UN has released $40 million from its Central Emergency Response Fund to help tackle the new outbreak of Ebola and other humanitarian crises in the DRC.
Genetic sequencing of the virus by the National Institute of Biomedical Research has shown that the DRC’s 11th Ebola outbreak, which was officially declared earlier this month, is likely to have started as a “spillover event”, a transmission from an infected animal.
“The evidence is sufficient to believe with confidence it is a spillover,” says Catherine Pratt at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, who was involved in the analysis.
Virus samples from related outbreaks should only have a relatively small number of mutations, as the virus won’t have had much chance to evolve. “This new Mdabanka strain is 350 mutations from the North Kivu strain,” says Pratt. “Therefore, we can say with confidence it comes from a separate source.”
Pratt says bats were the likely source of the outbreak, but that it could have been transmitted to humans through people eating mammals infected with the virus, such as bonobos, which are consumed as bushmeat in the region.
Sign up to our free Health Check newsletter for a monthly round-up of all the health and fitness news you need to know
More on these topics:
