Health officials in rural Guinea said on Sunday they had identified three cases of the deadly Ebola virus in a small rural community near the epicenter of an earlier epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people in a two-year period.
In a note released on Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that Guinea’s national laboratory confirmed three cases in the Goueke community, near the town of N’Zerekore, in the interior of the country. The first case occurred in a nurse who died on January 28. Two people who attended the nurse’s funeral died and four others reported symptoms similar to Ebola and were hospitalized.
Samples of the confirmed cases were sent to a laboratory administered by InstitutPasteur, a French laboratory in Senegal, for genome sequencing.
“It is a major concern to see the resurgence of ebola in Guinea, a country that has already suffered a lot from the disease,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa. “However, relying on the knowledge and experience gained during the previous outbreak, Guinea’s health teams are moving to quickly track the virus’s path and contain new infections.”
N’Zerekore is close to Guinea’s eastern border with Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire, and WHO said health officials in Liberia and Sierra Leone have begun to strengthen community surveillance to detect any wider spread of the virus. WHO warned Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Senegal and other regions in the area.
Goueke is just 160 kilometers from the small village of Meliandou, where, in late 2013, a child became the first known victim of the Ebola virus in an outbreak that eventually spread across borders to neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone. This outbreak ended up infecting more than 28,000 people and cost at least 11,300 lives – although the actual number was probably much higher.
The United States led a global campaign to eradicate the virus, finally deploying more than 1,400 health professionals from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and nearly 3,000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to help build health infrastructure in three of the poorest nations in the world. Earth.
Before that outbreak, Ebola was unknown in West Africa. Instead, it broke out several times in countries in Central Africa, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the virus was first identified in 1976, and in Sudan, Gabon, Uganda and the Republic of Congo.
Global health officials are also nervously watching the resurgence of a recent outbreak in an eastern province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a two-year outbreak that ended last year killed more than 2,200. Congolese health officials reported that at least one woman died in the city of Butembo last month, a worrying sign that the virus may have returned.