Ebola virus found in mainland Europe as doctor returning from outbreak tests positive
A doctor returning from a humanitarian mission Democratic Republic of Congo to France has now tested positive for the deadly Ebola virus after treating patients hit by the outbreak in the country
The doctor had been treating people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (file)
A deadly virus has been confirmed in mainland Europe after a doctor returning from treating people in a country with a major outbreak has tested positive.
The doctor was returning to France from a humanitarian mission Democratic Republic of Congo. Health officials have said the patient is now being isolated. The French healthy ministry played down reports of Ebola spreading and said it is currently low risk of impacting the general European population.
In a statement released on Wednesday (June 24), they said: “The health ministry confirms today the identification of a first positive case of Ebola virus disease on national territory”.
Confirmed cases in the Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo have passed the 1,000 mark, including 254 deaths, officials said. A total of 100 people have recovered in the outbreak concentrated in the Ituri province since it was declared on May 15, Congo’s health ministry said.
A total of 1,003 cases have been confirmed and at least 365 patients are in hospitals or in isolation, it said.
The Ebola outbreak caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, which has no vaccines or treatment, was the worst ever in its first month.
Officials admit there could be far more cases they still do not know about and that the peak of the outbreak is still ahead.
Contact tracing remains a key issue for local authorities, who have only achieved a 55% coverage rate, the ministry said.
“If you want to control an outbreak, especially an Ebola outbreak, you must know the index case. We don’t have confidence on when this outbreak started,” the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention director-general, Dr Jean Kaseya, told the Associated Press last week.
More than a month into the outbreak, officials believe the disease continues to outpace response efforts and no one knows its true scale.
At the Kigonze displacement camp in Bunia, the capital of Ituri, camp officials said on Friday that 10 people had died last week in unusual circumstances, raising the fear of a possible outbreak in the camp of more than 20,000 displaced people.
There had been no Ebola case confirmed at the site, camp officials said, but added that the death rate was unprecedented and called for investigation.
The UN refugee agency has said at least two million people forcibly displaced from their homes, including more than 320,000 refugees, live in areas at risk of Ebola in Congo.
In a statement on Friday, the agency said it was “deeply concerned by the accelerating spread” of the virus and “the growing risks it poses to displaced communities across the region”.
“If a disease or epidemic were to spread among the thousands of people living at this (Kigonze) site, it would be a real catastrophe given our already very precarious living conditions,” said Charite Banza, a civil society leader in Ituri.
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