3 Ebola deaths in Guinea raise concerns
The head of Guinea's health agency said Sunday that the country was in the midst of an Ebola "epidemic situation" with seven cases confirmed, including three deaths, the first possible resurgence of the disease there since the world's worst outbreak in 2013-2016 LATEST CASES
The patients fell ill with diarrhoea, vomiting and bleeding after attending a burial in Goueke sub-prefecture. The five still alive have been isolated in treatment centres, the agency ANSS said on Sunday. It was not clear if the person buried on February 1 – a nurse at the local health centre who had fallen ill – had also died of Ebola.
LAST MAJOR OUTBREAK
The last major outbreak of Ebola in West Africa started in Guinea. It went on to kill at least 11,300 people with the vast majority of cases in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Vaccines and improved treatments helped efforts to end the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record, which was declared over in Democratic Republic of Congo last June after nearly two years and more than 2,200 deaths. Congo reported three new Ebola cases this month in one of the epicentres of that epidemic in eastern North Kivu province. The World Health Organization has eyed each new outbreak since 2016 with great concern, treating the most recent one in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an international health emergency.
THE VIRUS
The Ebola virus causes severe vomiting and diarrhoea and is spr through contact with body fluids. has a much higher death rate than Covid-19, but unlike coronavirus it asymptomatic carriers. The 2013-2016 outbreak sped up the development of a vaccine against Ebola, with a global emergency stockpile of 500,000 doses planned to respond quickly to future outbreaks, the vaccine alliance Gavi said in January.
WHAT NEXT?
A World Health Organization representative said the agency would rapidly send assistance. Health workers are working to trace and isolate the contacts of the cases, ANSS said. It said Guinea would contact WHO and other international health agencies to acquire Ebola vaccines. The vaccines have greatly improved survival rates in recent years.
"WHO is ramping up readiness & response efforts to this potential resurgence of #Ebola in West Africa, a region which suffered so much from Ebola in 2014"
— WHO's regional director for Africa, MATSHIDISO MOETI