Source- AFP
Ebola has likely killed five people in Guinea after re-emerging in the country’s south, health authorities said, confirming two more deaths registered in recent days.
“Since the re-emergence of the disease, we have recorded five deaths, three probable and two confirmed,” said Fode Tass Sylla, spokesperson for the government’s Ebola response unit.
The three probable deaths were people who were buried before they could be tested, Sylla said, adding that 961 people may have come into contact with the victims and would now undergo monitoring.
Ebola was suspected in the case of a married couple who died in the rural southern village of Koropara, the wife in late February and the husband in early March, authorities had said last week.
This was followed by the deaths of a second wife of the same man and an 8-year-old girl at an Ebola treatment centre after health officials were alerted to the presence of the disease.
In addition, a man who tested positive for Ebola in the city of Nzerekore died on Monday, Sylla said.
A medical charity which reopened its specialist Ebola clinic in southern Guinea on Friday to treat the deceased girl and her mother was still caring for the woman, who had tested positive for the virus, the Alliance For International Medical Action (ALIMA) told AFP.
An investigation into the hundreds of people who may have acquired the disease from contact with Ebola victims was under way, focusing on “who came to [victims’] burials, who paid them visits, who washed the bodies,” Sylla added.
The World Health Organisation said on Friday Guinean health officials had alerted it to Ebola symptoms in the family’s village on March 16.
On Thursday the UN health body was already warning that a recurrence of the deadly virus – which has claimed 11 300 lives since December 2013 – remained a possibility.
The Guinean government said a quarantined area around the family’s home would be established, and announced a door-to-door search for other potential Ebola cases in the district.
The village is in the same region where the first Ebola case of the current outbreak was registered in December 2013.
Guinea was declared free of Ebola transmission at the end of last year, though a significant number of deaths are believed to have gone unreported and “flare-ups” relating to the persistence of the virus in survivors bodies poses ongoing challenges.
Meanwhile Liberia has closed its border with Guinea as a precaution against Ebola following at least four deaths from the virus in Guinea, Information Minister Lenn Eugene Nangbe told Reuters.
Guinea’s Ebola coordination unit has traced an estimated 816 people who may have come into contact with victims of the disease or their corpses during a recent flare-up in a village in the country’s southeast, a health official said on Monday.
Guinea said on Thursday that it had discovered new cases of Ebola just hours after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared neighbouring Sierra Leone’s latest outbreak over. Four people have died in the flare-up in Porokpara.
“Since the start of the tracing on Saturday, we have traced 816 contacts in 107 families,” Fode Tass Sylla, spokesman for the coordination unit, said on state television. “We are optimistic because everyone is motivated and cooperating.”
The villagers will be quarantined in their homes for 21 days, after which time, if they have not developed symptoms, they will be released, Sylla said.
The world’s worst Ebola outbreak on record is believed to have started in Guinea and killed about 2,500 people there by December last year when the WHO announced an end to active transmission in the country.
More than 28,600 people have been infected and 11,300 have died, nearly all of them in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, since the epidemic began in December 2013.