Ebola death toll in DRC rises to 41
• Doctors in region of Beni start treating patients with a prototype drug based on antibody isolated from survivor of outbreak in 1995
Forty-one people have died in the latest outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), health authorities said on Tuesday, adding that doctors are treating patients with a novel drug.
Out of 57 recorded cases as of Monday, 41 were fatal, the DRC ministry of public health and the World Health Organisation said. Fourteen of the deaths have been confirmed by laboratory tests, the ministry said.
On August 10, the ministry put the tally at 37 deaths, either confirmed or suspected.
The outbreak is the country’s 10th since 1976, when the disease was first identified in the DRC near the Ebola River, a tributary of the Congo River. Its epicentre is Mangina in the region of Beni, in the strife-torn eastern province of North Kivu.
For the first time since the outbreak was announced on August 1, one fatality was recorded outside of North Kivu — in the neighbouring province of Ituri, the ministry’s directorate for disease control said.
THERAPEUTIC DRUG
It added that doctors in Beni have started to use a novel treatment, mAb114, to treat patients with Ebola. The treatment is “the first therapeutic drug against the virus to be used in an active Ebola epidemic in the DRC”, the directorate said.
Developed in the US, the prototype drug is a so-called single monoclonal antibody — a protein that binds onto a specific target of the virus and triggers the body’s immune system to destroy the invader.
The antibody was isolated from a survivor of an Ebola outbreak in the western DRC city of Kikwit in 1995, it said. In May, the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that it was carrying out the first human trials of mAb114 to test it for safety and tolerance.
Use of the experimental treatment in the field comes on the heels of the deployment of an unlicensed vaccine in an outbreak of Ebola in the DRC earlier in 2018.
The decision to use the vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, came after trials during a pandemic in West Africa showed it to be safe and effective, the WHO says.
Immunisation with rVSVZEBOV was given to frontline health workers to provide them with additional protection — a tactic that has been repeated in the latest outbreak.
Ebola causes serious illness including vomiting, diarrhoea and in some cases bleeding. It is often fatal if untreated.
The WHO has expressed concern that the violence in North Kivu could hamper the fight against the new outbreak. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, visiting the area, called on Sunday for “free and secure access” for health workers.
The outbreak in North Kivu was declared a week after the WHO and the Kinshasa government hailed the end of a flare-up in Équateur province that killed 33 people.