‘Unknown disease’ that can kill within days leaves 53 dead in Congo
Investigators traced the outbreak’s origin to Boloko Village, where three children under the age of 5 died after reportedly eating a bat carcass, health officials said.
In addition to the other symptoms reported with this disease, the three children suffered through symptoms similar to those of a haemorrhagic fever – bleeding from the nose and the vomiting of blood – before they died between January 10 and January 13.
Following their deaths, four more children from the same village between the ages of 5 and 18 died. By January 27, there had been a total of 10 cases and seven deaths out of Boloko Village and two cases and one death out of the nearby Danda Village, the WHO said.
Less than two weeks later, a second outbreak of the mystery disease was reported to health officials in the village of Bomate.
By mid-February, investigators had identified 419 cases of the virus there, with 45 deaths, the WHO said.
Investigators sent samples from a total of 18 cases to the National Institute for Biomedical Research in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, for testing, the WHO said.
All the samples tested negative for common haemorrhagic fever diseases such as Ebola and Marburg, and “further laboratory testing is critical to identify the causative pathogen,” the WHO report said, adding that the two outbreaks may be not be linked.
Health officials noted that the remote location of the two outbreaks, combined with the country’s “weak health care infrastructure increase the risk of further spread, requiring immediate high-level intervention to contain the outbreak”.
In December, another unknown flu-like disease killed dozens in the southwest region of the country. Investigators later determined that the disease was likely acute respiratory infections complicated by malaria that had been compounded by acute malnutrition.
Michael Head, a senior research fellow in Global Health at the University of Southampton in Britain, said in an email that outbreaks of unknown or yet-to-be identified illnesses “will happen many times around the world”.
“A genuinely new illness, as we saw with Covid-19, of course can happen but is very rare,” Head said. “Usually, it’s a bug … that we know about but haven’t yet diagnosed in that particular outbreak.”
But Head expressed concern over the most recent outbreak in Congo, noting that the state of healthcare infrastructure in the country “means the public health response is more complicated”.
“Typically, such outbreaks are brought under control relatively quickly,” he said.
“However, here, it is concerning that we have hundreds of cases and over 50 deaths, with haemorrhagic-fever-like symptoms widely reported among those cases.”
While health officials grapple with this unknown disease in the west, medical facilities in the eastern part of the country are overwhelmed, according to WHO, with Congo’s Prime Minister reporting that more than 7000 people have died this year amid a push by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels to capture unprecedented amounts of mineral-rich territory.
