Health officials in rural Guinea said on Sunday they had identified three cases of the deadly Ebola virus in a small rural community near the epicenter of a previous epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people over a two-year period.
In a statement on Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Guinea’s national laboratory had confirmed three cases in the Goueke community near the town of N’Zerekore in the country’s inland forest region. The first case took place with a nurse who died on January 28. Two people who attended the nurse’s funeral died, and four others reported Ebola-like symptoms and are hospitalized.
Samples from the confirmed cases were sent to a laboratory run by InstitutPasteur, a French laboratory in Senegal, for genome sequencing.
“It is a great concern to see the resurgence of Ebola in Guinea, a country that has already suffered so much from the disease,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s regional director for Africa. “However, based on the expertise and experience gained during the previous outbreak, Guinea’s health teams are on the move to quickly track the virus and reduce subsequent infections.”
N’Zerekore is close to Guinea’s eastern borders with both Liberia and the Ivory Coast, and the WHO said health officials in Liberia and Sierra Leone have begun to strengthen community surveillance to detect any wider spread of virus. The WHO has alerted Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal and other regions in the area.
Goueke is just 100 miles from the small village of Meliandou, where in late 2013 a small child became the first known victim of the Ebola virus in an outbreak that eventually spread across borders into the vicinity of Liberia and Sierra Leone. That outbreak eventually infected more than 28,000 people and claimed at least 11,300 lives – although the true number was probably much higher.
The United States has led a global campaign to eradicate the virus, eventually deploying more than 1,400 health workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and nearly 3,000 soldiers in the 101st Air Division to help build health infrastructure in three of the poorest countries on Earth.
Prior to this outbreak, Ebola was unknown to West Africa. Instead, it broke out several times in Central African nations, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the virus was first identified in 1976 and in Sudan, Gabon, Uganda and the Republic of Congo.
World health officials are also nervous about the resurgence of a recent outbreak in an eastern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a two-year outbreak that ended last year claimed more than 2,200 lives. Congolese health officials have reported that at least one woman died last month in the town of Butembo, a disturbing sign that the virus may have returned.