Health officials in rural Guinea said on Sunday that they had identified three cases of the deadly Ebola virus in a small rural community near the epicenter of a previous epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people in the space of two years.
In a statement Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Guinea’s national laboratory had confirmed three cases in the community of Goueke, near the town of N’Zerekore in the interior of the country. The first case occurred in a nurse who died on January 28. Two people attending the nurse’s funeral have died, and another four have reported Ebola-like symptoms and have been hospitalized.
Samples of the confirmed cases were sent to a laboratory at InstitutPasteur, a French laboratory in Senegal, for genome sequencing.
“It is a major concern to see the resurgence of Ebola in Guinea, a country that has already suffered so much from the disease,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s regional director for Africa. “But thanks to the expertise and experience built up during the previous outbreak, health teams in Guinea are on the way to quickly trace the path of the virus and curb further infections.”
N’Zerekore is close to Guinea’s eastern border with both Liberia and the Ivory Coast, and WHO said health officials in Liberia and Sierra Leone have begun to strengthen community surveillance to detect a wider spread of the virus. The WHO has warned Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal and other regions in the area.
Goueke is only about 100 miles from the small village of Meliandou, where a young child became the first known victim of the Ebola virus in late 2013 in an outbreak that eventually spread across borders to neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone. That outbreak ultimately infected more than 28,000 people and claimed at least 11,300 lives – although the actual toll was likely much higher.
The United States led a global campaign to eradicate the virus, ultimately deploying more than 1,400 health workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and nearly 3,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to build health infrastructure in three of the poorest land on Earth.
Before that outbreak, Ebola was unknown in West Africa. Instead, it had broken out several times in Central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the virus was first identified in 1976, and in Sudan, Gabon, Uganda and the Republic of the Congo.
Global health officials are also nervously watching a resurgence of a recent outbreak in an eastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a two-year outbreak that ended last year claimed more than 2,200 lives. Congolese health officials reported that at least one woman died in the city of Butembo last month, a disturbing sign that the virus may have returned.