DR Congo Announces Resurgence of Ebola After Three Months Break

The Democratic Republic of Congo has announced a “resurgence” of Ebola in its eastern part after a woman died of the disease. The announcement is coming three months after the authorities have declared the end of the outbreak in the country.

In a Biena health zone of North Kivu province, the country’s Health Minister, Eteni Longondo, told the state television RTNC “We have another episode of the Ebola virus”.

“It was a farmer, the wife of a survivor of Ebola, who showed typical signs of the disease on February 1,” he added.

According to the health ministry, the woman died on Friday, February 3, after which a sample of her blood tested Ebola positive.

On November 18, the Democratic Republic of Congo declared the end of its 11th Ebola outbreak where 55 lives were lost from the 130 reported cases over about six months in the northwestern province of Equateur.

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The last person declared recovered from the disease in Equateur was on October 16.

The widely used Ebola vaccination in the country, administered to more than 40,000 people, helped curb the spread of the disease.

Ebola returned in the Northeast of the country, a region faced by violence between armed groups, at the time the African country was fighting its own COVID-19 outbreak.

The country experienced its worst-ever of the Ebola outbreak in its eastern part, it ran from August 1, 2018, to June 25, 2020, with 2,277 deaths.

The DRC’s record was the second-highest in the 44-year history of the disease, surpassed only by a three-year outbreak in West Africa from 2013 to 2016 that killed 11,300 people.

The Ebola haemorrhagic fever was first identified in 1976 following the probe of a string of unexplained deaths by a scientist in what is now northern DRC.

It has severed symptoms: high fever and muscle pain followed by vomiting and diarrhoea, skin eruptions, kidney and liver failure, internal and external bleeding.

According to the World Health Organization, the average fatality rate from Ebola is around 50% but this can rise to 90% for some epidemics.

The virus that caused Ebola in humans is believed to be in bats.