Democratic Republic Of Congo Records First Ebola Cases

Sunday, 24 August 2014

Democratic Republic Of Congo Records First Ebola Cases

Two people have tested positive for Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but are said to be different from the strands of the virus in West Africa.

The UN’s World Health Organization 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 male nurse who also contracted the disease in Sierra Leone, was evacuated to London.

The sobering news of Ebola’s spread came as UN officials pledged to step up efforts against the lethal tropical virus, which has infected more than 2,600 and killed 1,427, according to figures released Friday.

In Kinshasa, Congolese Health Minister Felix Kabange Numbi said that two of eight samples taken from victims of a mystery fever 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 Ebola in DR Congo, 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.