Cesare Ferrari/iStock(LONDON) — The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spread to the city of Goma, a major transportation hub along the Rwandan border that’s home to more than 1 million people.
A case was confirmed Sunday afternoon by the country’s health ministry. The patient, a 46-year-old pastor from South Kivu province who arrived in Goma on Sunday morning, was admitted to an Ebola treatment center there.
It’s the first Ebola case to be confirmed in the city since the current outbreak began nearly a year ago.
“It is important that people keep calm,” the nation’s health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga, said in a statement. “Due to the speed with which the patient has been identified and isolated, as well as the identification of all bus passengers coming from Butembo, the risk of spreading into the rest of the city of Goma remains low. However, caution remains.”
Goma is located on the country’s eastern border with Rwanda. It’s the capital of North Kivu province, one of the two affected provinces in the current Ebola epidemic.
“While not welcome news, it is something we have long anticipated,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general, said in a statement. “We have been doing intensive work to prepare Goma so that any case is identified and responded to immediately.”
A total of 2,489 people have reported symptoms of hemorrhagic fever in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s northeastern provinces of North Kivu and Ituri since Aug. 1, 2018. Among those cases, 2,395 have tested positive for Ebola virus disease, which causes an often-fatal type of hemorrhagic fever, according to the latest bulletin from the country’s health ministry.
The current outbreak has a case fatality rate of about 67 percent. There have been 1,665 deaths so far, including 1,571 people who died from confirmed cases of Ebola. The other deaths are from probable cases, according to the health ministry.
Copyright © 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.