First Ebola cases in DRC add to regional friction

Monday, August 25, 2014
By Paul Martin

MG.co.za
25 Aug 2014

The DRC has confirmed its first Ebola outbreak in 2014, but claims it’s unrelated to the epidemic. It comes as the first UK case is also confirmed.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) Health Minister Felix Kabange Numbi said on Sunday that two of eight samples taken from victims of a mystery fever in the north of the country had tested positive for Ebola.

“The results are positive. The Ebola virus is confirmed in DRC,” Kabange told AFP.

Speaking later on public television, he said the confirmation marked the seventh outbreak of the virus in the DRC, where the virus was first identified in 1976 near the Ebola River.

But he said the two new cases had “no link to [the epidemic] raging in West Africa” and were different strains from one another.

Authorities immediately imposed a quarantine around the affected area in Equateur province near Jera, more than 1 200 kilometres northeast of the Congolese capital Kinshasa. Medical aid group Médecins Sans Frontières said it was sending a crew to help handle patients in the area.

First British patient evacuated
The UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO) also announced that one of its health experts, an epidemiologist, had been infected while working in Sierra Leone.

Also on Sunday, Britain’s first Ebola patient, a nurse who also contracted the disease in Sierra Leone, was evacuated to London.

An isolation ward in a London hospital had been readied for the country’s first Ebola patient.

The Rest…HERE

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