A French doctor who was working within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has tested positive for Ebola after returning home.
France’s health ministry said the patient had been on a humanitarian mission and is currently isolating.
Those that could have come into contact with the patient are being traced, and the overall risk the outbreak presents in Europe stays low.
Last week, it was revealed that the ‘first line of defence’ against the deadly strain of Ebola has collapsed.
The DRC is facing its largest ever outbreak of the virus, with nearly 781 infected and 267 dead.
But Oxfam has warned that the true toll is probably going far higher, because the country’s contact tracing programme and water infrastructure are at breaking point.
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Just one in five health centres within the northeastern province of Ituri, the worst-affected region, has access to enough clean water.
In Mongbwalo, a town of 140,000 people, only two in 10 have access to scrub water, and 1 / 4 have access to working hygiene facilities.
North Kivu province is even seeing Ebola cases being identified after the patient has died, unaware they’d the illness.
Why is that this Ebola outbreak so concerning?
The strain of Ebolavirus behind this outbreak, referred to as Bundibugyo, is rare and currently has no vaccine or treatment.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed that is the biggest Bundibugyo outbreak on record.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a public health emergency last month following the outbreak.
What’s Ebola?
Ebola is a rare haemorrhagic fever which spreads through the fluids of infected and dead patients.
Ebola symptoms can start between two and 21 days after infection. They’ll appear suddenly and include flu-like symptoms, resembling a hot temperature, extreme tiredness and a headache.
Other symptoms include:
- bleeding from the nose, gums or vagina
- being sick
- diarrhoea and tummy pain
- a skin rash
- yellowing of the skin and eyes
- blood in stools
- bruises everywhere in the body
- bleeding from the ears, eyes, nose or mouth
- muscle pain
- sore throat
- blood in vomit
Contact tracing – identifying the people an infected person has come into contact with – has just 43% coverage in DRC.
Oxfam fieldwork found that there are only 0.2 doctors per 1,000 people, and a few 70 health facilities have been destroyed by conflict.
The years-long violence in DRC has displaced hundreds of thousands, including people in Ituri, complicating contact tracing efforts.
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