Just three months after the official end of the Ebola epidemic in the western part of the country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo he has to reckon again with an outbreak of the virus that it seemed to have defeated. On February 3, a woman from Biena, in the eastern province of North Kivu, died from the consequences of hemorrhagic fever. The patient was the wife of a survivor of the previous Ebola epidemic, and it is being investigated whether there is a link between the new infections – 4 cases so far – and the old epidemic.
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Viral reserves. The Ebola virus can survive dormant in the semen of cured patients for at least a year, as has been established from previous studies, and these residues could play a role in the new reappearances of the infection (although the presence of viral RNA in the fluids of the survivors does not give information on the ability to transmit the pathogen). The World Health Organization is studying the new virus strain to see if it is related to the previous one, and has clarified that some sporadic cases of infection can occur, as a tail of previous epidemics.
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Contemporary return. Meanwhile, the country has started the vaccination campaign with the 8000 remaining doses of the Ervebo vaccine, the first anti-Ebola vaccine approved by the FDA in 2019 and purchased for the last epidemic wave, which had killed 2,287 people since August 2018. All this happens while another distant African country – Guinea, in the western part of the continent – declares a new Ebola outbreak, with seven confirmed cases and three deaths. The infected had attended the same funeral in the city of Gouécké.
Even in the first Ebola epidemic, the rites of accompaniment to the deceased had acted as multipliers of the infections, with 20% of new cases attributable to a funeral. The custom of washing, greasing and dressing the deceased favors contact with the potentially infected fluids of the deceased, which carry the virus. Ebola is transmitted to humans through contact with infected animals, but then passes from person to person through the body fluids of the patient (in particular with the blood of the infected, affected by internal bleeding).
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Overlapping pandemics. The existence of an approved vaccine is a cause for relief, but there are currently only 500,000 doses set aside by the GAVI Alliance, the international cooperation to improve access to vaccines for poor countries. The total population of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the three states most affected by the Ebola epidemic 2013-2016, is 22.5 million people, and at the moment the main concern of the manufacturers is the anti-covid vaccines.
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