Guinea has declared an Ebola epidemic after three people died and four others tested positive for the virus in the country’s southeast.
The seven people fell ill with diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding after attending a burial in Goueke, near the Liberian border. The infected patients have been isolated in treatment centers, the health ministry said.
“Faced with this situation and in accordance with international health regulations, the Guinean government declares an Ebola epidemic,” the ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
One of the victims was a nurse who fell ill in late January and was buried on February 1, National Health Security Agency chief Sakoba Keita told local media.
“Some people who took part in this funeral began to have symptoms of diarrhoea, 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 – left 11,300 dead across West Africa.
Fighting Ebola again will place additional strain on health services in Guinea as they battle the coronavirus. Guinea, a country of around 12 million, has so far recorded 14,895 coronavirus infections and 84 deaths.
The Ebola virus causes severe vomiting and diarrhoea and is spread through contact with body fluids. It has a much higher death rate than COVID-19, but unlike coronavirus, it is not transmitted by asymptomatic carriers.
The second round of tests is being carried out to confirm the latest Ebola diagnosis and health workers are working to trace and isolate the contacts of the cases, state health agency ANSS said.
It said Guinea would contact the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international health agencies to acquire Ebola vaccines. The vaccines have greatly improved survival rates in recent years.
“WHO is ramping up readiness & response efforts to this potential resurgence of #Ebola in West Africa, a region which suffered so much from Ebola in 2014,” the agency’s regional director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti said on Twitter.
‘Response efforts’
WHO has eyed each new outbreak since 2016 with great concern, treating a recent one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as an international health emergency.
On Sunday, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted the UN health agency had been informed of suspected cases of the deadly disease in Guinea.
“Confirmatory testing underway,” the tweet said, adding the WHO’s regional and country offices were “supporting readiness and response efforts”.
Liberian President George Weah on Sunday put his country’s health authorities on heightened alert.
Weah “has mandated the Liberian health authorities and related stakeholders in the sector to heighten the country’s surveillance and preventative activities in the wake of reports of the emergence of the deadly Ebola virus disease in neighboring Guinea”, his office said in a statement.
Neighboring DRC has faced several outbreaks of the illness, with the WHO on Thursday confirming a resurgence three months after authorities declared the end of the country’s latest outbreak.
DRC, which declared the six-month epidemic over in November, confirmed the fourth case in North Kivu province on Sunday.
The widespread use of Ebola vaccinations, which were administered to more than 40,000 people, helped curb the disease.
The 2013-2016 spread sped up the development of the vaccine against Ebola, with a global emergency stockpile of 500,000 doses planned to respond quickly to future outbreaks, the vaccine alliance Gavi said in January.
