A case of Ebola contamination has been detected in a town in the north-west of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the virus had caused the death of 55 people in 2020, we learned on Saturday from an official source.
“The Democratic Republic of Congo has just registered a new case of the Ebola virus disease” in Mbandaka (Ecuador, north-west), Jean-Jacques Mbungani, Congolese Minister of Health, told AFP.
“The case is a 31-year-old student who arrived at the hospital on April 5 and died on April 21. Laboratory examinations in Mbandaka, confirmed by the National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB) in Kinshasa, demonstrated that there was a significant Ebola virus load in the samples,” explained Dr Mbungani.
“Local and ministry experts are already following around 74 contacts. They will be able to control this epidemic as soon as possible,” he added.
“Time is not on our side,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Africa in a statement.
“The disease has taken a two-week head start and we are now playing catch-up,” she said, praising however the experience of the DRC in the fight against this disease.
Since 2018, the occurrence of the Ebola epidemic has become cyclical from April to June in the Equateur region (north-west) and the following months in the northeast (Kivu, Ituri), say experts contacted by AFP.
In 2021, an Ebola outbreak declared in Beni in eastern DRC lasted “two months and nine days”, with 11 cases recorded and a total of 9 deaths. In 2020 in Mbandaka, hemorrhagic fever caused the death of 55 people out of 130 recorded cases.
Currently, Ebola teams have two treatments approved at the end of 2020 by the United States Medicines Agency (FDA): REGN-EB3, a cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies, and mAb114, a monoclonal antibody marketed under the Ebanga brand. .
Experts also use the anti-Ebola vaccine rVSV-ZEBOV to interrupt the chain of transmission, by vaccinating contact cases of patients.
First identified in 1976 in the DRC (ex-Zaire), the Ebola virus is transmitted to humans by infected animals. Human transmission is through body fluids, with the main symptoms of fever, vomiting, bleeding, diarrhea.