Winning the battle against deadly Ebola

Oct 2 2007

The latest reports from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) say health workers are slowly winning the battle against the deadly Ebola hemorrhagic fever.

Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) along with teams from the DRC Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization (WHO), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and others, have been supporting the local efforts to control the outbreak of Ebola in a remote province.

Experts have been very concerned over the possible spread of the haemorraghic fever in isolated villages in West Kasai province in the centre of the country.

According to the WHO since September 11th twenty four cases of Ebola, five cases of typhoid and a case of Shigella dysentery have been confirmed in West Kasai.

MSF says three patients, two of who have been confirmed with Ebola, were detected last week, and already 176 people have died from Ebola and related illnesses such as shingella, malaria and typhoid fever since May.

According to the aid group however the number of admissions to an isolation unit in Kampungu, a village of 9,000 people which is the epicentre of the outbreak, is down from previous weeks, and MSF says they are close to controlling the Ebola outbreak.

Doctors remain cautious because the incubation period for Ebola is 21 days and some infected people may yet show up; symptoms include a high temperature, bloody diarrhoea and visible haemorrhaging.

Up to 90 percent of those infected die from Ebola.

Experts say the epidemic will not be declared over until two 21-day incubation periods without a new case have passed.

As the virus still appears to be circulating in some neighbouring villages authorities remain vigilant and are actively looking for suspect cases of the highly contagious disease in about 20 villages within a 30 kilometre (19 mile) radius of the epicentre.

The CDC and Health Canada authorities have provided an eight-person team and a complete field laboratory for the testing and analysis of samples enabling diagnostic tests to be performed on site in an effort to determine the scope of the outbreak.

An accurate diagnosis is now available in 24 hours.

Ebola hemorrhagic fever is a severe and highly fatal disease caused by a virus from the same family as the one that causes Marburg hemorrhagic fever.

Though both diseases are rare, they can cause dramatic outbreaks with human-to-human transmission and a high fatality rate.

There is currently no specific treatment or vaccine and an earlier Ebola outbreak in 1995 in Zaire claimed 233 lives; the death toll from the current outbreak is to date 171.