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Ebola Outbreak: First Case Discovered in DRC's Goma City, Home to 2 Million People

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 16 2019, @08:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-very-not-good dept.

martyb writes:

Ebola Outbreak: First Case Discovered in DRC's Goma City, Home to 2 Million People:

The first case of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo city of Goma has been discovered.

Goma, a lakeside city with a population of two million people, is close to the Rwanda border – more than 354 km (220 miles) south of where the second-largest Ebola outbreak was first detected a year ago.

The haemorrhagic fever has gradually spread south, infecting almost 2,500 people and killing more than 1,600.

The Ministry of Health said the person with the confirmed case was a pastor who became infected during a visit to the city of Butembo, where he interacted with Ebola patients.

He first developed symptoms last week before taking a bus to Goma on Friday.

When he arrived in Goma on Sunday he went to a clinic where he tested positive for Ebola.

Officials have now located the bus driver and 18 other passengers, who will all be vaccinated on Monday.

[...] Ronald Klain, who served as Barack Obama's Ebola czar, said: "Just one case might be just one case. But, if this is multiple cases in Goma, that is a turning point."

Goma has been preparing for the arrival of Ebola for a year, setting up hand-washing stations and making sure mototaxi drivers do not share helmets.

But in more rural areas, where containment efforts have been hindered by mistrust of health officials and militia violence, the virus has been hard to contain and the number of new cases has spiked.

Also at
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48985689
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/vaccinations-ebola-dr-congo-city-goma-190715111221895.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/ebola-spread-east-congo-s-goma-massively-raises-risk-n1030066

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @10:01AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @10:01AM (#867482)

    I bet under 300.

    236 is the number of confirmed infection in US for the 2015-16 Zika epidemic [wikipedia.org].

    Notice how all the vaccine research started in 2017 [wikipedia.org] and all the notable trials are US based, even if "as early as August 2014, physicians in Natal in northeastern Brazil began to investigate an outbreak of illness characterized by a flat pinkish rash, bloodshot eyes, fever, joint pain and headaches" and confirmed infection were in the 10K-100K range (see the first link)

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @10:17AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @10:17AM (#867484)

    Ah zika, the virus for which there is n reliable blood test (to distinguish from eg dengue fever) that is supposedly responsible for the fake disease of microcephaly (micrencephaly is the real disease, microcephaly just means your head is smaller than 2 sd below the average as a baby which usually doesn't even correspond to head size as an adult).