Estimated DR Congo Ebola death toll jumps to 131

KINSHASA: The toll from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has risen to an estimated 131 deaths from 513 suspected cases, health minister Samuel Roger Kamba said.

The previous figures from the epidemic in the country’s east, which the World Health Organization has declared an international health emergency, gave a total of 91 dead out of 350 suspected cases.

No vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola behind the latest outbreak of the deadly disease, which has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the past half century.

“We have recorded roughly 131 deaths in total and we have around 513 suspected cases,” Samuel Roger Kamba told Congolese national television overnight.

He however cautioned that the toll was an estimate and further research was needed to confirm whether all 131 suspected deaths were indeed linked to Ebola.

The outbreak’s epicentre is in the northeastern Ituri province on the border with Uganda and South Sudan, whose status as a gold-mining hub leads to people regularly crisscrossing the region.

The virus has already spread into neighbouring provinces, as well as beyond the DRC’s borders.

Suspected cases have been reported in the commercial hub of Butembo in neighbouring North Kivu province, some 200 kilometres away from the epidemic’s ground zero, Kamba said, without giving further details.

Another case has been recorded in Goma, a key provincial capital currently in the hands of the Rwanda-backed M23 militia.

“Unfortunately, the alert was slow to circulate within the community, because people thought it was a mystical illness, and so, as a result, the sick were not taken to the hospital,” Kamba said.

As few samples have been able to be tested in laboratories to date, the assessments are based mainly on suspected cases.