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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: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:04PM (2 children)
Not necessarily. The current fatality rate of this outbreak is 50%.
It may also be that medicine is able to respond to the disease more effectively and learning how to prolong the life. It may be that populations are getting smarter and responses are getting tighter (for example, in the TFA here it reported they were aware of the bus the patient used and are moving to get the other riders immunized.) Like a lot of mortal infections, knowing how to manage it can be a tremendous multiplier. Keep the body fighting and you may get a survivor on the other side (like a lot of viruses, actually...)
It may be that this particular strain isn't as lethal. The first recorded outbreak in 1976 in Congo was also the Zaire strain and had 88% lethality, the 1994 Gabon outbreak was only 60%, the 1995 Congo one was 81%, the 2014 Mali was 75%, 2017 Congo 50%, 2018 Congo 61% (source [who.int]), the point being that the fatality rate bounces around even in the same strain.
As you say, it might also be because surveillance is catching other cases sooner or better distinguishing them from malaria or other conditions.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @06:44PM
All those things could also be going on. But we know for certain that only the worst cases have been getting reported.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:08PM
> As you say, it might also be because surveillance is catching other cases sooner
No, that poster isn't factually based. If someone who has had contact gets the vaccine fast enough, their mortality odds drop to about 50% from a > 90% lethality. It's not that surveillance is catching more that would have been survived, it's that surveillance is getting the vaccine to contacted people faster, and improving survival.
GP AC poster - I think he/she has posted several times here - is utterly incorrect about the nature of the surveillance/survival relationship. The DRC outbreaks this decade have had low mortalities because the vaccine was out. I haven't researched pre-2000 events so can't give info on those, sorry.
The vaccine doesn't give immunity, but it does dramatically increase survival odds even in post-infection, pre-symptomatic cases.