With seven confirmed cases in the West African country, including three deaths, officials are announcing a new Ebola outbreak.
Guinea has declared an Ebola epidemic after three people died and four others tested positive for the virus in the southeast of the country.
The seven people became ill with diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding after attending a funeral in Goueke, near the Liberian border. The infected patients have been isolated in treatment centers, the health ministry said Sunday.
“Faced with this situation and in accordance with international health regulations, the Guinean government is announcing an Ebola epidemic,” the ministry said in a statement.
One of the victims was a nurse who fell ill in late January and was buried on February 1, Sakoba Keita, head of the National Health Security Agency, told local media.
“Some of the people attending this funeral started to have symptoms of diarrhea, vomiting, bleeding and fever a few days later,” he said.
Health Minister Remy Lamah said officials were “really concerned” about the deaths, the first since a 2013-2016 epidemic – which began in Guinea – that killed 11,300 in West Africa. The vast majority of cases occurred in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Fighting Ebola again will put an extra burden on health services in Guinea during the coronavirus pandemic. The country of about 12 million inhabitants has so far registered 14,895 coronavirus infections and 84 deaths.
Ebola virus causes violent vomiting and diarrhea and is spread through contact with body fluids. It has a much higher mortality rate than COVID-19, but unlike coronavirus, it is not transmitted by asymptomatic carriers.
A second set of tests are being conducted to confirm the latest Ebola diagnosis and health professionals are working to track down and isolate the contacts of the cases, the state health agency ANSS said.
It reported that Guinea would contact the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international health agencies to obtain Ebola vaccines. The vaccines have greatly improved survival rates in recent years.
“The WHO is stepping up its preparedness and response efforts for this potential resurgence of #Ebola in West Africa, a region so badly affected by Ebola in 2014,” said Matshidiso Moeti, the agency’s regional director for Africa, on Twitter.
‘Response efforts’
The WHO has viewed every new outbreak since 2016 with grave concern and has treated a recent outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as an international health emergency.
On Sunday, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted that the agency had been notified of suspected cases of the deadly disease in Guinea.
“Confirmatory tests underway,” the tweet said, adding that WHO regional and country offices “supported the readiness and response efforts.”
Meanwhile, next door in Liberia, President George Weah put his country’s health authorities on extra alert on Sunday.
Weah “has mandated Liberian health authorities and related industry stakeholders to tighten up the country’s surveillance and preventive activities in the wake of reports of the rise of the deadly Ebola virus disease in neighboring Guinea,” his office said in a statement. .
Neighboring DRC has faced several outbreaks of the disease, with WHO on Thursday confirming a resurgence three months after authorities announced the end of the country’s latest outbreak.
The DRC, which declared the six-month epidemic over in November, confirmed a fourth case in North Kivu province on Sunday.
The widespread use of Ebola vaccinations, given to more than 40,000 people, helped contain the disease.
The 2013-2016 spread accelerated the development of the Ebola vaccine, with a global emergency supply of 500,000 doses planned to respond quickly to future outbreaks, the vaccine alliance Gavi said in January.