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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
(Score: 5, Informative) by martyb on Tuesday July 16 2019, @10:52AM (4 children)
There already IS a vaccine. It has already been administered to healthcare workers and others who are working to combat the disease. It is also administered to those who have come in contact with those who are infected.
Unfortunately, as the story notes, fears as well as the ravages of an ongoing war has precluded vaccination of everyone against measles. I fail to see how a country-wide vaccination against Ebola would be possible, when measles has already proven even more deadly.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:17PM (1 child)
There's also the risk of the natives slaughtering everyone associated with Ebola: The infected, the cured, their family members, the medical staff.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @02:53AM
Niggas gunna nigg.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:11PM
Part of the problem is local mindset. These folks have had terrible expriences with colonizers pulling the "just trust us and do what we say" card and are suitably mistrustful of any injection. Religious beliefs (needing to drink from a cup pressed to the lips of the dead) also compound it. The local armed conflict makes delivering the vaccine unreliable and challenging, and if armed conflict blocks a village off, sorry, WHO and other NGOs are simply not going to be able to get there.
Measles is more deadly by headcount but not by infectiousness or by mortality post-infection.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:14PM
Oh also - the vaccine is not perfect. It is only considered potent for about 12mo, and doesn't confer complete immunity.
Source: I'm probably the only poster here who's actually handled the vaccine. Certainly most posters on the ebola stories don't seem to have done even a casual read of the literature. Not very many epidemiologists here I suppose. Too bad - that statistical and networked view of the world is the one which matters here, and in many socialtech and hard-tech stories!