The World Health Organization (WHO) announced yesterday, Tuesday, that in addition to the confirmed case of Ebola virus found in Cλεte d'Ivoire, there is now a suspected case and 9 contacts that are under monitoring.
"In terms of numbers, there are two cases. "One has been confirmed - a young woman - and there is also a suspicious case," WHO spokesman Tariq Jasarevic told a news conference in Geneva. "Currently 9 contacts have been identified," he added.
The first case of the Ebola virus was detected on Saturday in Abidjan. She is an 18-year-old girl from Guinea, who arrived in Cλεte d'Ivoire on August 11 from the city of Lape in northern Guinea, traveling more than 1.500 kilometers by road. The patient is being treated at a hospital in Abidjan, while on Monday an operation was launched to vaccinate health workers against the Ebola virus.
Residents of the Ivory Coast financial capital, where the young woman from Guinea lived, were vaccinated yesterday, Tuesday, according to AFP reporters. "We know the patient stayed here before she went to the hospital, so all people in the area who are in contact should be vaccinated," said Pierre Deba, Cπουργte d'Ivoire's health minister. The Minister noted that "we expect in the coming days that the contacts will reach 2.000", clarifying that these are those who traveled with the young woman who has been infected with the virus and those who came in contact with these travelers.
Vaccination of medical personnel in Abidjan began on Monday. The search for the young woman's contacts continues in the area from which she started in Guinea. "Right now all the members of her family are with us in the isolation center. We are continuing the investigations to locate the contacts ", the director of the regional health service of Lampe, Dr. Mamadou Andi Dialo, explained to AFP.
"We do not know the source of the infection. "If he got infected here in Lampe, outside of Lampe, mainly on the way to Ivory Coast passing through the forest of Guinea," in the Jerezore region, he added. It is in this forest area that the 2021 epidemic broke out in the country, but also the one that struck West Africa between the end of 2013 and 2016, which killed more than 11.300 people, mainly in Guinea (2.500 deaths), in Liberia and Sierra Leone, three of the world's poorest countries, are undervalued, according to the WHO.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said it was "extremely worrying" that the Ivory Coast outbreak occurred in Abidjan, a metropolis of more than four million people, two months after the announcement of the end of the 2021 Guinea epidemic.
"As for the first research on the Ebola genome found in Abidjan, we have no indication at this time that this outbreak in Cλεte d'Ivoire is related to the Ebola outbreak raging in Guinea earlier this year," Jasarevic said. "More laboratory tests will have to be done to find out if it is related to any previous epidemic," he added.
The WHO spokesman also noted that the first results show "that it is probably the strain of Zaire virus", the subtype of the Ebola virus that was presented this year in Guinea, as well as the great epidemic in West Africa. Although Ivory Coast borders Guinea and Liberia, it has not recorded any confirmed cases of Ebola since 1994, the year a scientist became infected during a chimpanzee epidemic. This ivory outbreak is the third on the African continent this year, after those found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Guinea.