Steve Quayle News Alerts

February 7, 2003

Six people have died in the past week from Ebola virus infection in the northwest of Congo Republic, the second outbreak there in 2 years, a senior health official said on Friday. Damase Bozongo, director general of health, told Reuters that the victims died in Kelle, 440 miles north of the capital Brazzaville, near the border with Gabon which was also hit by an Ebola outbreak last year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said earlier on Friday in Geneva that it had sent a team to the central African country to investigate a suspected outbreak of the virus. The United Nations health agency said the team left Brazzaville on Thursday to investigate 16 deaths in the Mbomo and Kelle districts which could have been caused by the virus. Kelle and Mbomo are about 40 miles from the border with neighboring Gabon. Ebola is spread by infected body fluids and kills anywhere from 50 to 90 per cent of its victims through massive internal bleeding, depending on the strain.

Bozongo said the 6 deaths in Kelle were caused by Ebola. "The clinical signs present are without doubt those of the Ebola virus," he said. There is no known cure for Ebola, a hemorrhagic fever which left at least 73 people dead in Congo and Gabon in an outbreak from October 2001 to February 2002.

"The outbreak last year was sparked after people ate the meat of infected primates," Fadela Chaib, the WHO spokeswoman, told a news briefing in Switzerland on Friday. "Perhaps the same has occurred this year because in December WHO received reports of dead primates in this region."

In some parts of Africa, villagers exist largely on wild "bush meat," and authorities have urged people to avoid eating monkeys found dead in the forests. Bush meat is also prized in some cities as an expensive delicacy. The disease was named after a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it was discovered in 1976. The worst outbreak was in that country in 1995 when over 250 people died.

[Laboratory confirmation is awaited, but it is interesting that the director general of health of the Congo Republic is on record as clinically confirming the disease, suggesting that there is a high probability that this is another Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak in the same region of the country. We await final laboratory confirmation as well as more epidemiological information as it becomes available from the field. - Mod.MPP]

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-health-congo-ebola.html http://www.promedmail.org