Rural Guinea health officials say Sunday 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 in a two-year period. .
In a statement on Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Guinea’s national laboratory had confirmed three cases in the Goueke community near the town of N’Zerekore in the country’s inland forest region. The first case occurred in a nurse who died Jan. 28. Two people who attended the nurse’s funeral died and four more reported Ebola-like symptoms and are hospitalized.
Samples of confirmed cases have been sent to a laboratory run by the InstitutPasteur, a French laboratory in Senegal, for genome sequencing.
“It is a great concern to see the resurgence of Ebola in Guinea, a country that has already suffered so much from the disease,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa. “However, given the experience and expertise gained during the previous outbreak, Guinea’s medical teams are on the move to quickly chart the path of the virus and curb infections.”
N’Zerekore is close to Guinea’s eastern borders with Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire, and the WHO said health officials in Liberia and Sierra Leone have begun tightening community surveillance to detect any wider spread of the virus. . The WHO has alerted Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal and other regions in the area.
Goueke is located about 100 kilometers from the small village of Meliandou, where in late 2013 a small child became the first known victim of the Ebola virus in an outbreak that eventually spread to the borders to the neighbors Liberia and Sierra Leone. That outbreak eventually infected more than 28,000 people and caused at least 11,300 lives, although the true toll was probably much higher.
The United States led a global campaign to eradicate the virus, which eventually deployed more than 1,400 health workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and nearly 3,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to help build health infrastructure in three of the largest countries. impoverished land.
Prior to this outbreak, Ebola was unknown to West Africa. Instead, it had erupted 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.
World health officials are also nervously watching the resurgence 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 died last month in the town of Butembo, a worrying sign that the virus could have returned.