Skip to main content

Ebola outbreak in east Congo now world’s second biggest

Ebola, west congo, outbreak

KINSHASA: The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo is now the second biggest in history, with 426 confirmed and probable cases, the health ministry said late on Thursday.

The epidemic in a volatile part of Democratic Republic of Congo is now only surpassed by the 2013-2016 outbreak in West Africa, where more than 28,000 cases where confirmed, and is bigger than an outbreak in 2000 in Uganda involving 425 cases.

Ebola is believed to have killed 245 people in North Kivu and Ituri provinces where attacks by armed groups and community resistance to health officials have hampered the response.

Congo has suffered 10 Ebola outbreaks since the virus was discovered there in 1976. It spreads through contact with bodily fluids and causes hemorrhagic fever with severe vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding, and in many flare-ups, more than half of cases are fatal.

“This tragic milestone clearly demonstrates the complexity and severity of the outbreak,” Michelle Gayer, Senior Director of Emergency Health at the International Rescue Committee said in a statement. “The dynamics of conflict (mean) … a protracted outbreak is … likely, and the end is not in sight.”

Ebola virus, formerly designated Zaire ebolavirus, is one of five known viruses within the genus Ebolavirus., cause a severe and often fatal hemorrhagic fever in humans and other mammals, known as Ebola virus disease (EVD). Ebola virus has caused the majority of human deaths from EVD, and is the cause of the 2013–2015 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa, which resulted in at least 28,616 suspected cases and 11,310 confirmed deaths.

The post Ebola outbreak in east Congo now world’s second biggest appeared first on ARYNEWS.



from ARYNEWS https://ift.tt/2zwDF5T
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more