Doctors have revealed how two Ebola patients attended church service with about 50 other people before finally dying.
An emergency medical coordinator at Medecins Sans Frontieres
(Doctors Without Borders), on Thursday revealed that two Democratic
Republic of Congo Ebola patients who fled hospital in the city of
Mbandaka on Monday attended a prayer meeting with 50 people hours before
they died, Jean-Clement Cabrol, the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN reports.
Health officials are scrambling to contain an outbreak of the
deadly disease in the heavily populated port city in northwest Congo
that is believed to have killed 22 people since April.
Two new deaths from Ebola and seven new confirmed cases have been
recorded in Democratic Republic of Congo, the health ministry said on
Tuesday.
One of the deaths occurred in the provincial capital of Mbandaka, according to a daily bulletin.
A nurse also died in the village of Bikoro, where the outbreak was
first detected, ministry spokeswoman Jessica Ilunga told Reuters.
The ministry said the seven new confirmed cases were registered in Bikoro.
Health officials administered an experimental vaccine on Monday to
33 medical workers and Mbandaka residents, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic
told reporters in Geneva.
The vaccine manufacturer Merck has provided WHO with 8,640 doses of
the vaccine and an additional 8,000 doses are expected to be available
in the coming days, WHO said.
Congo’s ninth outbreak of Ebola since 1976 is believed to have killed at least 28 people so far.
Officials are particularly concerned by its appearance in Mbandaka,
a crowded trading hub on the Congo River with road, water and air links
to Congo’s capital, Kinshasa.
NAN reports that the WHO said it will need 26 million dollars for the Ebola Response in the DRC over the next three months.
WHO said it had also released two million dollars from its Contingency Fund for Emergencies, to scale up the Ebola response.
The Government of DRC, with the support of WHO partners, is
preparing to vaccinate high risk populations against Ebola Virus Disease
(EVD) in affected health zones.
The organisation said health workers operating in affected areas
were being vaccinated on Monday and community outreach had started to
prepare for the ring vaccination.
More than 7,500 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine have been
deployed to DRC to conduct vaccination in the northwestern Equator
Province where 46 suspected, probable and confirmed Ebola cases and 26
deaths have been reported – as of Friday.
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