Kinshasa – Unidentified diseases in the northwest of the Congo have killed more than 50 people over the past five weeks, nearly half of them within hours after they felt the disease.
Vaspianes in two villages began distant in the province of Congo on January 21, including 419 cases and 53 deaths. Health officials still do not know the cause, or whether the cases in the two villages, which are separated by more than 120 miles (190 km), are linked. It is also unclear how diseases are spread, including whether they are spreading among people.
The first victims in a village were children who took a strike and a Tofio within 48 hours, the African Health Organization Office He said this week. More infections are found in the other village, where at least some patients have malaria.
Divide in two remote villages
Diseases were assembled in two remote villages in different health areas of Equateur, which has an area of 400 miles (640 km) from Kinshasa.
The outbreak of the first outbreak began in the village of Buluko after he ate three children of the bats and Tofio within 48 hours. After more than two weeks, a second and larger outbreak was recorded in the village of Bomate, where more than 400 people were exposed. According to the office of the African Office, no links were created between cases in the two villages.
Dr. Serge Nagalpato, the medical director of the Picoro Hospital, a regional control center, and one of the government experts who were deployed to respond to the outbreak of fascism, says the positions in the villagers are somewhat different.
“The first one with a lot of deaths, we continue to investigate because it is an extraordinary situation, (and) in the second episode that we deal with, we see many cases of malaria.”
The World Health Organization office in Africa said that rapid progress from the disease to death in Buloco is a major concern, along with the large number of deaths in Polit.
What are the symptoms?
The Congo Ministry of Health said that about 80 % of patients share similar symptoms including fever, feeling, body pain and diarrhea.
While these symptoms can be caused by many common infections, health officials were initially afraid of symptoms and rapid deaths of some victims could also be a sign of hemorrhagic fever, such as Ebola, which was also associated with an infected animal.
However, Ebola and similar diseases, including Marburg, were excluded after more than ten samples were collected and tested in the Kinshasa capital.
Those who said that he was investigating a number of possible causes, including malaria, viral hemorrhagic fever, food poisoning or water, typhoid fever and meningitis.
What is done in response to the response?
The Congo government says that experts have been sent to the villages since February 14, as a basis for helping to investigate issues and slow down.
Nagalpato said that patients respond to treatments that target various symptoms.
The distant location of the villages hindered access to patients while the weak health care infrastructure made it difficult to conduct surveillance and patient management. Such challenges are common in the outbreak of diseases in the Congo. In December, an unknown disease was killed.
In the latest outbreaks, many victims died even before experts could reach them.
The World Health Organization office in Africa said that
The United States was the largest bilateral donor of the Congo health sector and supported the training of hundreds of field epidemics to help discover and control diseases throughout the vast country. The outbreaks of the outbreaks were detected as the Trump administration placed a freeze on external aid during a 90 -day review.
Is there a link to Congo forests?
There were long concerns about the diseases that jump from animals to humans in places where people eaten wild animals regularly. The number of these outbreaks in Africa has increased by more than 60 % in the past decade, and the World Health Organization said in 2022.
Experts say this may be what is happening in the Congo, which represents a home to about 60 % of the forests in the Congo basin, having the largest space for tropical forests on Earth.
“All of these viruses are viruses that have tanks in the woods.” Gabriel Nesakala, a professor of public health at the National University of Congolese, said, “As long as we have these forests, we will always have some epidemics with the viruses that will turn.”
