Five dead in the newest Ebola outbreak in Congo
It is unclear how the disease emerged in the city during the lockdown.
The infections were identified in the western city of Mbandaka in Equateur province. Equateur province last experienced an Ebola outbreak in 2018, with 54 cases and 33 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Congo is still struggling to extinguish the second-largest Ebola epidemic in history in the eastern part of the country, where more than 2,260 people have died despite the use of two new vaccines.
The central African country has reported 3,195 cases of coronavirus and 72 deaths. By far the worst epidemic affecting the DRC is measles, which has infected nearly 370,000 people and killed 6,779 since 2019.
The Ebola virus lives in bats. By far the largest epidemic of Ebola was in 2014-2016 in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. More than 28,000 people were infected in that epidemic and more than 11,000 of them died.
Ebola causes fever, bleeding, weakness, and abdominal pain, and kills about half of those it infects. It is transmitted through contact with sick or dead people or animals and is named for the Ebola River, in Congo, where it was first identified, in 1976.
