Today's Edition
KINSHASA (AFP)
Africa's latest outbreak of Ebola has passed 10,000 confirmed cases, the vast majority of them in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Congolese health authorities said on Tuesday, with almost 5,000 fatalities.
According to the DRC's figures, 10,060 people have been infected and 4,887 have died since the virus was first detected in May in the vast central African country's deadliest outbreak in its history.
Cases have likewise been detected in Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda, with the World Health Organisation warning that Africa faces a "complex" task to contain an outbreak spanning the east, west and centre of the continent.
While some 2,684 have recovered from the virus in the DRC, the epidemic's fatality rate appears to be close to 50 percent, according to the Congolese National Institute of Public Health.
Among the many challenges facing the response is the lack of any approved vaccines or treatments for the rare Bundibugyo species of Ebola behind the epidemic.
After spreading under the radar for weeks, the virus was first detected in the northeastern Congolese province of Ituri, kicking off the DRC's 17th outbreak of the disease. It has since spread across swathes of the country's northern and eastern regions. Ituri and the eastern North Kivu province account for the majority of reported cases.
After registering a total of 20 cases and two deaths, neighbouring Uganda was declared Ebola-free by the WHO in late August.
Kenya, which had not reported a single case of the contagious virus until October 6, has now seen two virus deaths from nine cases, most of them from recent travellers to the DRC.
The only case so far confirmed in Nigeria, a 42-year-old Swiss woman who contracted the virus following a trip to Uganda with her husband, was evacuated to a hospital in Geneva on Monday.
Director-General of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), Congolese Jean Kaseya, told AFP his organisation was still trying to track how the patient came into to contact with the virus.
"We saw that the genomic sequencing of the Kenyan case is similar to the Nigerian case. And we discovered that yesterday with some cases in Beni," he explained. "Today it's an outbreak in three regions. We didn't see that since we started to have experience of Ebola outbreaks. We were not thinking that Nigeria could be an at risk country."
Testing of the Ervebo vaccine, which has already proven to be effective against the more common Zaire strain of the virus, has begun in recent weeks to determine whether it could also provide protection against the Bundibugyo variant.
