- Guinea declared an Ebola outbreak on Sunday, the country’s first report of the virus since 2016.
- Three people died, among seven confirmed Ebola cases linked to a nurse’s funeral.
- The Guinean health ministry said it isolated the survivors and started tracking contacts.
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Guinea declared an Ebola outbreak for the first time since 2016, when a two-year outbreak in West Africa finally ended after killing more than 11,000 people.
The new outbreak in the city of Gouécké has already killed three – two women and one man. They were among seven people who attended a nurse’s funeral on February 1 and later experienced diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding. All seven cases have already been confirmed as an Ebola virus.
The four people who are still alive have been isolated and contact tracking has started, Guinea’s health ministry, Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire (ANSS), said in a Facebook post on Sunday.
Ebola can cause fever, pain and fatigue before progressing to “damp” symptoms, such as vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding. On average, its mortality rate is around 50%.
The virus spreads through the body fluids of a sick or recently deceased person. Certain body fluids, such as semen, can still transmit the virus after an infected person has recovered from his illness, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infected animals, such as bats or primates, can transmit the virus to humans and trigger new outbreaks.
“Ebola’s resurgence is very worrying for what it can do for people, for the economy, for health infrastructure,” said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, assistant professor of infectious disease medicine at South Carolina Medical University, to the Associated Press .
“We are still understanding the repercussions of the (last) outbreak on the population,” he added.
Kuppalli was the medical director of an Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone during the 2014-2016 outbreak, which started in Guinea and spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. More than 28,000 people contracted the virus during those years, according to the CDC.
This is West Africa’s first outbreak since then. The Guinean government says it is in a hurry to suppress the resurgence, build a new Ebola treatment center and speed up distribution of the Ebola vaccine.
Health professionals enter a new cemetery for Ebola victims outside Monrovia, Liberia, March 11, 2015.
Abbas Dulleh / AP
“The government assures the people that all measures are being taken to contain this epidemic as soon as possible,” said the ANSS in its Facebook post.
Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, regional director of the World Health Organization for Africa, said on Twitter that she was “very concerned” about the new outbreak and that WHO was also “stepping up readiness and response efforts”.
Since 2016, new outbreaks of Ebola have only appeared in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including one that was particularly deadly from the summer of 2018 to the summer of 2020. More than 2,000 people died during that resurgence.
Congo reported another outbreak of the virus last week. It seems to be unrelated to the new cases in Guinea.