More than 10,000 Ebola patients have been recorded in Africa, the vast majority in the DRC, a huge country in Central Africa at the epicenter of an epidemic, which has spread to several other regions of the continent, with cases currently reported in Kenya and as far west as Nigeria.
The current epidemic outbreak was officially declared by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) almost six months ago, on May 15. Detected late, the virus had already resurfaced in the country of more than 100 million inhabitants for several months prior, specialists now agree.
Ebola, which is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids and causes a severe hemorrhagic fever, has already claimed more than 15,000 lives in Africa over the past 50 years. The worst outbreak recorded in the past in the DRC resulted in nearly 2,300 deaths out of 3,500 reported cases between 2018 and 2020.
Case fatality rate close to 50%
To date, 10,060 people have been infected in the DRC and 4,887 have died, according to the latest figures from the Congolese National Institute of Public Health (INSP) on Tuesday. Some 2,684 recoveries have been reported, but the case fatality rate is close to 501 per 100,000.
Starting in the Ituri province (northeast), the 17th epidemic in the history of the DRC has spread to eight Congolese provinces, notably Ituri and North Kivu (east), which concentrate the majority of recorded cases.
Over the past few months, the virus has crossed borders several times. In neighboring Uganda, twenty cases, including two deaths, were reported before the epidemic was declared eradicated from the territory in August.
In October, nine cases, including two deaths, were recorded in Kenya.
«" Complex "»
Last week, a case of Ebola was reported in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. The patient, a 42-year-old Swiss woman and wife of an employee at the Swiss embassy in Abuja, had traveled to Uganda with her husband before returning to Nigeria.
She was evacuated by air ambulance to Switzerland on Monday, where she is now being treated in a Geneva hospital. Fifty-three contact cases have been identified by Nigerian health authorities.
Last week, the WHO warned that Africa was facing an Ebola epidemic.« more complex »"since the virus was detected in the west of the continent, while it is also present in the east and center.
In the DRC, the health response still lacks resources in remote infected areas, where the presence of armed groups complicates movement. Healthcare workers and humanitarian aid workers also face distrust from local populations, which has led to several incidents in recent months.
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Bundibugyo
On Saturday, a nurse was killed and a health worker seriously injured in Tshopo province (northeast), according to the WHO. The Ebola treatment center where the incident occurred was immediately closed, Dr. Marcel Likolo, chief medical officer of the Bafwasende health zone, told AFP.
According to him, young people in the area accused the victims of having tried to contaminate the population with tablets containing the virus before attacking them.
The current epidemic is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola disease virus, against which there is no approved vaccine or treatment to date.
The first doses of the Ervebo vaccine, which has proven effective against the Zaire strain – the most frequently encountered in previous epidemics – have been administered in recent weeks in the DRC to volunteers as part of a clinical trial.
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