Announcement by the Ministry of Health comes nearly three months after the DRC ended the 11th Ebola outbreak.
A new case of Ebola has been identified near the town of Butembo in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the country’s Ministry of Health has announced.
In the city of Biena, a woman was found with symptoms of the deadly virus on February 1, who died in hospital in Butembo on February 3. She was married to a man who contracted the virus from a previous outbreak.
“The provincial response team is already busy. It will be supported by the national response team that will visit Butembo shortly, ”the ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
The announcement may mark the beginning of the 12th Ebola outbreak in DRC since the virus was discovered near the Ebola River in 1976, more than double that of any other country.
It comes nearly three months after the DRC announced the end of the 11th outbreak hundreds of miles to the west, in which 130 people were infected and 55 people were killed. That outbreak overlaps with an earlier outbreak in the East that killed more than 2,200 people, the second – the most in the history of the disease.
The emergence of more cases could complicate efforts to eradicate COVID-19, which infected 23,600 people and killed 681 people in DRC. A vaccination campaign is expected to start in the first half of this year.
Ebola is a virus-caused hemorrhagic fever that is spread through contact with bodily fluids. In extreme cases, it causes deadly bleeding from internal organs, the mouth, eyes or ears.