Two of three Ebola patients who escaped quarantine in the Congo river port city of Mbandaka have died, the head of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres’ (MSF) mission in the city said on Wednesday.
The third patient was found alive and is currently under observation by MSF and the World Health Organization, Henri Gray said.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is witnessing a fresh outbreak of the of the dreaded Ebola virus and so far more than twenty people have died from the virus.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo last week launched an Ebola vaccination programme in a bid to stop the latest outbreak of the deadly viral disease from spreading.
The first wave of immunisations targetted healthcare staff in the northwest of the country who have had direct or indirect contact with infected patients, the DRC government said on Monday.
Alarm bells sounded last week after the outbreak, previously reported in a remote rural area of the country, notched up its first confirmed case in Mbandaka, a city of 1.2 million people, where three subsequent cases have been confirmed.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has dispatched 35 immunisation experts, including 16 mobilised during the last deadly outbreak in West Africa, which began in 2013. The rest of the team is made up of newly trained staff from the DRC.
More than 7,500 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine have been deployed in the effort, which is being funded by a variety of international organisations.
“Vaccination will be key to controlling this outbreak,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said in a statement on Monday.
With agency reports