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 An 18-year-old woman tested positive on Saturday after travelling by
bus to Abidjan from neighbouring Guinea. It is Ivory Coast's first
confirmed case of Ebola in 25 years.
About 200 health workers, many from the hospital in Abidjan where
the woman was admitted, received shots and the health ministry said
it was aiming to vaccinate 2,000 people by Wednesday. The country
has 5,000 doses available.
"This is a situation that is under control," Health Minister Pierre
Dimba told reporters. He said the woman was in stable condition and
that authorities had identified about 70 people who travelled in the
same vehicles as her.
Ebola spreads through contact with the body fluids of symptomatic
people. Health officials try to prevent it from spreading by
monitoring and vaccinating people who come into contact with
confirmed cases.
The WHO has said it is deeply concerned about the virus' presence in
Abidjan, a densely-populated city of more than 4 million. Ebola
typically kills about half of those it infects although vaccines and
new treatments have proved highly effective in reducing fatality
rates.
In Guinea, the health ministry said on Monday that it would begin
vaccinating, although it did not say when. Guinea was declared free
of Ebola on June 19 after a four-month outbreak in the south killed
12 people.
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Authorities believe the woman who tested positive travelled from
northern Guinea by bus, passing through the Nzerekore region in the
southeast, where the last outbreak began.
She then crossed Guinea's southern border into Ivory Coast and
reached Abidjan several hundred kilometres farther south on Aug. 11.
She was hospitalised the next day.
A WHO report said preliminary genetic sequencing showed a close
match between her case and the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak, which
killed a record 11,300 people. That epidemic originated in
southeastern Guinea before spreading to Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Last week, Guinea confirmed one death from the Marburg virus, West
Africa's first case of the highly infectious hemorrhagic fever which
is similar to Ebola.
(This story corrects typographical error to "began" instead of
"begin", paragraph 1)
(Reporting by Loucoumane Coulibaly in Abidjan and Saliou Samb in
Conakry; Writing Cooper Inveen and Aaron Ross; Editing by Bernadette
Baum, Jonathan Oatis and Grant McCool)
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