It is Alerte maximale, maximum alert in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a mysterious outbreak has until now killed nearly 100 people in the Kwango region, in the west of the country. Patients arriving at hospitals with very high fevers, coughs, sore throats and anaemia have died from “lack of blood transfusions.”
Children are the first victims. The number of reported cases has reached 380: from 10 to 25 November, the “unclassified” disease (which has all the symptoms of influenza with a dramatic outcome) killed between 76 and 143 people, according to the Ministry of Health. About 27 died in hospitals, the others at home.
Most of the victims were children under the age of 5.
“It is similar to a respiratory disease,” Health Minister Roger Kamba told a press conference yesterday, “but it is hard to say how it is transmitted before we have the results of the laboratory analysis of the samples taken.”
Unknown health event. The Panzi region, about 700 km south-east of Kinshasa, is particularly affected. Minister Kamba admitted that he did not have enough tools to classify the virus and that it was an “unknown public health event.”
It is “an epidemic level that needs to be closely monitored,”
he said. The World Health Organisation is working with the ministry to make a diagnosis.
A troubled country. The Democratic Republic of Congo is facing other serious disasters, first and foremost the instability in the east of the country, which is at the mercy of the armed guerrilla warfare of the M23 and ADF militias, responsible for the destruction of entire villages in North Kivu. It is also fresh from another complicated epidemic, that of the Mpox virus, which killed 1,000 people in a few months.
(*) Popoli e Missione
