A mysterious disease The Democratic Republic of Congo has developed symptoms similar to Ebola. The disease was first discovered on January 21, with hundreds of people infected and more than 50 people dying in the northwestern part of the country in the past five weeks, according to the World Health Organization. Health officials have not identified the cause of the disease.
The initial investigation revealed that the outbreak began in the village of Boroko, where three children died a few days after eating the body of a bat. Symptoms of infection include fever, headache, diarrhea, nosebleed, vomiting blood and general bleeding – matching symptoms caused by viruses such as Ebola and Marlborough. However, experts ruled out the pathogen after testing more than a dozen samples of suspected cases.
In early February, health authorities recorded a second group of cases and deaths in the village of Bomate, although there are currently no known links in the cluster. As of February 15, when the WHO last reported the outbreak, there were 431 suspected infections, including 53 deaths. In most cases, the interval between symptoms and onset of death is only 48 hours.
Samples from 18 cases have been sent to the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which tested negative for the most common pathogens associated with symptoms of hemorrhagic fever, although some have tested positive for malaria. “The exact cause remains unknown, and Ebola and Marlborough have been ruled out, raising concerns about severe infections or toxic drugs,” the person wrote in a recent announcement, stressing the urgent need to speed up laboratory investigations, improve management and isolation of infected people, and increase surveillance and risk communication. “The distant location and weak healthcare infrastructure add to the risk of further discrepancies and requires immediate advanced intervention to curb the outbreak.”
Disease outbreaks are caused by pathogens transferred to animals that are human (a process called zoonotic spillover) that are becoming increasingly common in Africa. Changes in land use and climate change are two main drivers, as they both increase human contact with pathogen-Haboling wildlife. According to WHO estimates, disease outbreaks spread from animals to humans in Africa increased by 63% between 2012 and 2022. In recent years, there have been several MPOX outbreaks on the African continent, as well as clusters of Ebola and Marburg cases.
At the end of last year, another mysterious disease killed more than 70 people, many of them children, in the southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The symptoms of this outbreak are similar to influenza, and most patients tested sample recovered positive for malaria. The outbreak was later attributed to respiratory infections caused by malaria.
This story originally appeared in wired Italy and has been translated from Italian.
