A patient has been admitted to Radboudumc in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, with a possible Ebola infection. The hospital reports this.
This is a low suspicion, confirms the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). The patient is in a so-called ‘High Level Isolation Unit’. It is currently being investigated whether there is actually Ebola.
The results of the test are expected during the weekend, a hospital spokesperson said. The Dutch Ministry of Health cannot say how the patient is doing, whether it is a Dutch person and whether measures are being taken based on the possible contamination. “These questions are for the RIVM and the hospital,” says a spokesperson.
Number of cases in Congo continues to rise
The number of Ebola cases in eastern Congo continues to rise. Nearly 750 suspected infections and 177 possible deaths have been registered. This is reported by the World Health Organization (WHO). The epidemic now poses a “very high” risk in Congo.
“Violence and insecurity are hindering the fight against the epidemic,” WHO CEO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus writes on X. 82 infections and seven deaths have been confirmed in the laboratory. The WHO assumes that the actual number of infections is considerably higher because not all sick people are registered or reported.
Rebel group
Abdirahman Mahmoud, Director of Alert and Response Operations at WHO, referred during a press briefing to the first confirmed cases in Goma (the capital of North Kivu province) and in South Kivu. Both regions are controlled by the rebel group M23, which is backed by Rwanda.
Goma also has a large airport that has been closed since the takeover by M23 early last year. “We need humanitarian access,” Mahmoud said. “To scale back the risk, global solidarity will be needed.”
Low key
Contact tracing in the hotspot of the outbreak, in the Bunia region, is still at a low level due to the security situation. Only 11 percent of contacts could be traced there, says WHO director Anne Ancia. Elsewhere, contact tracing has been described as “very satisfactory” by the WHO.
In neighboring Uganda, no new cases have emerged so far, apart from two known infections and one death. The situation there is “stable,” Tedros said during the briefing. “The measures taken there appear to have been effective in containing the spread of the epidemic.”
Waiting for vaccines
There are already several avenues for medication, but they still need to be tested. We still have months to wait for the first vaccines.
The outbreak started in the northeastern province of Ituri (which borders Uganda and South Sudan) and has since spread to parts of North Kivu. This is the seventeenth recorded Ebola outbreak in Congo since 1976. The situation is particularly complex because it concerns the rare Bundibugyo type, for which there is no vaccine or treatment. Congo experienced two outbreaks of this type in 2007-2008 and 2012.
Ebola is a contagious and life-threatening infectious disease transmitted through bodily fluids. More than 11,000 people died during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 and 2015.
