Geneva – Guinea’s capital Conakry has recorded its first new Ebola cases in more than a month, while other previously unaffected areas have also reported infections in the past week, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The spread of the two-month-old
outbreak, which Guinean authorities earlier said had been contained,
risks further complicating the fight against the virus in a region
already struggling with weak healthcare systems and porous borders.
“The situation is serious, you can’t say
it is under control as cases are continuing and it is spreading
geographically,” Dr Pierre Formenty, a WHO expert who recently returned
from Guinea, told a news briefing in Geneva on Wednesday.
“There was no decline. In fact it is
because we are not able to capture all the outbreak that we were under
the impression there was a decline,” he said.
The WHO reported two new cases,
including one death, between 25 and 26 May in Conakry. They were the
first to be detected since 26 April. An outbreak in the capital could
pose the biggest threat because the city is Guinea’s international
travel hub.
Telimele and Boffa – two districts north
of Conakry previously untouched by the disease – both confirmed
outbreaks through laboratory testing, the WHO said. Twelve cases,
including four deaths, were reported there between 23 and 26 May, while
suspected Ebola infections were documented in the adjacent districts of
Boke and Dubreka.
Aboubacar Sidiki Diakité, who heads the
Guinean government’s efforts to halt the virus’s spread, said the
origins of all the new outbreaks had been traced back to cases in
Conakry.
“The problem is that there are families
that refuse to give information to health workers. They hid their sick
to try to treat them through traditional methods,” he told Reuters.
The outbreak – the first deadly
appearance of the haemorrhagic fever in West Africa – has spread from a
remote corner of Guinea to the capital and into Liberia.
Hospitalized
Sierra Leone reported its first confirmed outbreak of the disease earlier this week.
Families of three people hospitalised
with suspected Ebola and one confirmed case have removed their loved
ones from a clinic in eastern Sierra Leone because they feared the
consequences of medical care, said senior Sierra Leone health official
Amara Jambal.
“We do not have any idea where they [the
four patients] are. Worried? As a doctor I should be worried because an
infected person on the loose is not what we want,” Jambal told Reuters,
adding that those infected should be in isolation.
Formenty said authorities would pursue dialogue with the families in an attempt to get the missing people back into care.
The WHO has documented a total of 281
clinical cases of Ebola, including 185 deaths in Guinea since the virus
was first identified as Ebola in March.
The disease is thought to have killed 11 people in Liberia, though there have been no new cases there since 9 April.
Sixteen cases – seven of them confirmed
through laboratory testing and another nine suspected – have been
reported in Sierra Leone’s Kailahun district, where four people are
believed to have died of the disease.
Ebola, which has a fatality rate of up
to 90%, is endemic to Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Uganda and
South Sudan. Researchers believe the West African outbreak was caused by
a new strain of the virus.
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