Suspected Ebola cases have \u2060been reported in a previously unaffected province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, highlighting the expansion of the ongoing outbreak as the death toll hit 600.<\/p>\n
The outbreak, declared on 15 May, has so far infected 1,759 people across Congo’s eastern provinces of Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu, according to the government’s latest situation report.<\/p>\n
But that case total does not include two cases in \u200cKisangani, the capital of \u2060Tshopo province and one of Congo’s biggest cities, the situation report said.<\/p>\n
One of those cases is linked to the health zone of Niania in Ituri province, where the first cases were reported. But the second case “does not appear to \u200chave a geographic link” beyond Kisangani, it said.<\/p>\n
The positive test results are in the process \u2060of being validated by confirmatory testing, after which they will \u200cbe included in the official case total, it said.<\/p>\n
Response teams have \u2060in the \u200cmeantime begun strengthening surveillance, contact tracing and other containment measures in Kisangani, it said.<\/p>\n
The \u2060situation report documented 51 new cases and 20 new deaths in the previous 24 hours.<\/p>\n
It was reported last week that Congolese health authorities were tracing people potentially exposed to \u2060Ebola in two provinces not previously affected by the outbreak: Tshopo and Haut-Uele.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization (WHO) said this week that the outbreak had not yet stabilised and was still expanding as population movement fuelled transmission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Suspected Ebola cases have \u2060been reported in a previously unaffected province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, highlighting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":507986,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":["post-540246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}