CONAKRY, February 14 (Reuters) – Guinea officially declared another outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever on Sunday, the first in nearly eight years, after several positive cases were confirmed in the southeast of the country.
According to health authorities, eight people have tested positive and at least three of them have died.
This is the first time that the virus has been reported in the West African country since the last major outbreak of haemorrhagic fever, in 2013-2016, which started in Guinea and killed at least 11,300 people, in Guinea, Sierra Leone and mainly in Liberia.
A fourth person buried on February 1 may also have succumbed to the virus, which causes sudden fever, headaches, vomiting and diarrhea.
This dispensary nurse died of an undetermined illness after being transferred to Nzrkor, a town on the border with Liberia and Cte d’Ivoire.
“Faced with this situation and in accordance with international health regulations, the Guinean government has declared an Ebola epidemic”, announced the Minister of Health.
The five surviving people were placed in solitary confinement. The authorities are working to trace and isolate people who have been in contact with them, said the National Health Security Agency (ANSS).
A treatment center will be opened in Goueck, in Forest Guinea, an hour’s drive from Nzrkor, where the first cases were detected.
It is in the same region that the first epidemic started in December 2013.
Guinea has asked the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide it with doses of the vaccine against Ebola, which have greatly contributed in recent years to reducing the death of this highly contagious virus.
“The Ebola resurgence in Guinea, a country that has already suffered so much from the disease, is very worrying,” WHO regional director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti said in a statement.
Because of the new focus’s proximity to their borders, WHO is working with health authorities in Liberia and Sierra Leone to strengthen surveillance and testing capacity, the international organization said.
Vaccines and improved treatments for the disease brought an end to the second largest epidemic outbreak to date in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year. The epidemic was declared defeated last June after two years of efforts and some 2,200 deaths.
However, the DRC reported on Sunday a fourth case of people infected with Ebola in the province of North Kivu, where the virus reappeared on February 7. (Saliou Samb, Alessandra Prentice, French version Jean-Stphane Brosse)
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