DRC Ebola death ends hopes of Covid-19 sole focus
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) recorded its first case of Ebola in more than 50 days, the government said on Friday, ending hopes that the second-worst outbreak of the disease in history might be over.
The Central African country planned to declare an end to the outbreak on Sunday, which would have allowed its overstretched health workforce to concentrate on containing the coronavirus, which has infected 215 and killed 20.
The new Ebola case, the first since February 17, was a 26year-old man in the area of Beni, a town in eastern DRC.
Ebola has killed more than 2,200 people since August 2018 in a volatile area of the country where rebel attacks hobbled efforts to contain it.
The country is also trying to beat back a measles epidemic.
“This is now a triple emergency: vulnerable populations facing ongoing humanitarian crises, the spread of Covid-19, and now again potentially a re-emerging Ebola crisis,” said Kate Moger, the International Rescue Committee’s regional vice-president for the Great Lakes region in Africa.
Ebola causes fever, bleeding, vomiting and diarrhoea and spreads among humans through bodily fluids. The current outbreak has killed about twothirds of those it infected.
Flare-ups or one-off transmissions are common towards the end of outbreaks and a new case does not necessarily mean the virus will spread out of control again.
But it can stay in semen for more than 550 days, researchers have said, and can be transmitted through sex long after a patient recovers.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been expecting more cases to emerge and is primed to respond, said its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Unfortunately, this means the DRC government will not be able to declare an end to the outbreak as it has hoped, he said.
“But WHO and all partners remain on the ground and committed as ever to working ... to end the outbreak.”
The DRC has suffered 10 outbreaks of the virus since it was first detected in humans near the Ebola River in 1976. However, the world’s biggest was in West Africa between 2013 and 2016, which killed more than 11,000 people.
Two new vaccines have had a major effect on containing the virus this time, though Islamist rebels stopped health workers from reaching some areas where the virus had spread.
Late in 2019, deadly attacks on health centres in and around the city of Beni forced aid groups to suspend operations and withdraw staff from the epidemic’s last strongholds.
For those on the front line, like Babah Mutuza Lusungu, a doctor at a health research clinic in Beni, Friday’s news was a bitter blow.
“It’s really a step backwards. You see today if we’re going to start managing a pandemic and an epidemic at the same time, it’s going to be impossible, it’s going to be very difficult to manage,” he said.