An Ebola outbreak has been declared in the north-west of the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are two confirmed cases of the virus and 17 deaths, the health ministry said on Tuesday.
The incident in the town of Bikoro comes more than a year after an outbreak in the country killed four people.
In 2014. more than 11,000 people were killed in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The outbreak declaration was made after laboratory results confirmed two cases of Ebola out of a sample of five suspected patients, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said it is preparing for “the worst case scenario” as it deals with a recent outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo from spreading any further.
The health agency will begin sending vaccines “as quickly as possible” to the northwestern town of Bikoro and surrounding areas, where 18 people are suspected to have died as a result of the virus in recent weeks, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a Twitter post on Friday.
A team of WHO experts, alongside regional health officials and staff from international medical charity Doctors Without Borders (known by its French initials, MSF), are working in Bikoro as part of a coordinated medical response to the crisis.
Laboratory tests undertaken earlier this week in the capital, Kinshasa, resulted in the only two confirmed cases of the virus – which has no proven cure – in Congo since the outbreak began.
Source Al Jazeera, Angel Hearts
