The confirmed cases of the new Ebola outbreak detected northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) already amount to three, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) reported this Saturday.

The new infection was detected in the Katwa area, near the town of Butembo, in the Congolese province of North Kivu.
“WHO is working with its partners to rapidly provide essential medical supplies in support of the response of the DRC Ministry of Health in North Kivu,” the WHO Africa office noted via Twitter.
With this, there are now three accumulated cases since last February 7 the Government of the DRC announced that a person who had died four days earlier in Butembo had tested positive for Ebola.
The second contagion was a person who had been in contact with the first case and who also died, according to the Congolese health authorities explained last Thursday.
The African country continues to work on contact tracing and, to try to contain the spread of the disease, will apply vaccination and control strategies that have already taken effect in past outbreaks.
These new cases of Ebola in North Kivu have occurred only about three months after the DRC announced, on November 18, the end of the eleventh Ebola outbreak in its history, in the western province of Ecuador and that ended the lives of 55 people and infected another 130, according to official figures.
Just a few months earlier, the Congolese authorities had already declared the end of what was the tenth epidemic, which devastated three provinces in the northeast of the country (North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri) from August 2018 to June 2020, with a result of 2,280 deaths.
That tenth epidemic was the worst in the history of the DRC and the second most serious in the world, surpassed only by the one that ravaged West Africa from 2014 to 2016, in which 11,300 people died and there were more than 28,500 cases, although the real figures -according to the WHO- they may be higher.
In this northeastern Congolese area, the same area where these new infections have been registered, the response was complicated by social mistrust and violence from the dozens of armed groups operating in the area.
Ebola disease is transmitted by direct contact with the blood and body fluids of infected people or animals, causes hemorrhagic fever and can reach a mortality rate of 90%. 

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