80 dead have been reported from the eastern Congo province of Ituri, and 246 people are suspected of being infected with the Bundibugyo Ebola virus. Eight cases were confirmed in the laboratory on May 16. In Ituri province, outbreaks of the disease appeared in three places – in the provincial capital Bunia and in the gold-mining towns of Mongwalu and Rwampara, WHO said. A large population movement is common in them.
However, suspicions of infection and sudden deaths are also reported from other towns in Ituri. Two cases of infection were confirmed in neighboring Uganda, in the capital Kampala, among two people who had traveled there from the Congo. One of them died.
There is already suspicion of the spread of the disease to the Congolese capital, Kinshasa. A test for the Bundibugyo virus in a person who returned there from Ituri came out negative. However, WHO also writes about the confirmed case from Kinshasa. Several people from the Congolese province of North Kivu are also suspected of being infected. In the provincial capital of Goma, which is controlled by rebels from the Rwanda-backed M23 group, one case of infection has already been confirmed, the BBC reported.
The epidemic was caused by a different strain of Ebola than the previous one
Since there is a large movement of people in the area, there are fears that there are many more infected people and the infection continues to spread throughout the region and not only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The situation is complicated by the fact that it is a different strain of Ebola than Ebola-zaire. No vaccine is approved for the bundibugyo strain. For strains of ebola-zaire and ebola-sudan there are effective vaccines Ervebo (rVXV-ZEBOV) as well as Zabdeno or Mvabea.
Ebola was first discovered in 1976 in Zaire, in today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. In fifty years, 15,000 people succumbed to the virus. The worst epidemics in the Congo were in 2018 and 2020, which claimed 2,300 human lives. Last year, 45 people died of Ebola in a remote area of the Congo. There is no cure for the disease, which is spread by bats, and the mortality rate is 50 percent.
Ebola is transmitted by contact with an infected person or body fluids. Consumption of bat meat contributes to repeated epidemics.
