Guinea’s rural health officials said on Sunday that they had identified three cases of the deadly Ebola virus in a small rural community near the epicenter of a previous epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people over two years.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement on Sunday that the national laboratory in Guinea had confirmed three cases in the community of Goueke, near the city of N’Zerekore, in the inland forest area. The first case occurred in a nurse who died on January 28th. Two people who attended the nurse’s funeral were killed, and four more reported Ebola-like symptoms and were hospitalized.
Samples from the confirmed cases were sent to a laboratory run by the InstitutPasteur, a French laboratory in Senegal, for genome sequencing.
“It is very worrying to see the revival of Ebola in Guinea, a country that has suffered so much from the disease,” said Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s Regional Director for Africa. “However, Guinea’s health teams are on the verge of locating the expertise and experience gained during the previous outbreak to quickly detect the virus and limit further infections.”
N’Zerekore is close to the eastern border of Guinea with both Liberia and Ivory Coast, and the WHO said health officials in Liberia and Sierra Leone have begun strengthening community surveillance to detect any greater spread of the virus. WHO has warned Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal and other regions in the region.
Goueke is only about 100 kilometers from the small town of Meliandou, where a young child became the first known victim of the Ebola virus at the end of 2013 in an outbreak that eventually spread across borders to neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone. This outbreak eventually infected more than 28,000 people and claimed at least 11,300 lives – although the true toll was probably much higher.
The United States led a worldwide campaign to eradicate the virus and eventually mobilized more than 1,400 health workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and nearly 3,000 troops from the 101st Air Division to help build health infrastructure in three of the poorest countries. earth.
Before the outbreak, Ebola was unknown in West Africa. Instead, it has broken out several times in Central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the virus was first identified in 1976, and in Sudan, Gabon, Uganda and the Republic of the Congo.
Global health officials are also nervously watching a revival of a recent outbreak in an eastern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a two-year outbreak that ended last year claimed more than 2,200 lives. Congolese health officials reported that at least one woman was killed in the town of Butembo last month, a worrying sign that the virus may have returned.