Health officials said on Friday that the latest cases were more than
700 km (430 miles) south of where the outbreak was first detected.
Ebola has killed at least 1,900 people in Democratic Republic of
Congo over the past year. This is the second biggest toll ever and
militia violence combined with local resistance have made the
outbreak harder to contain.
The 24-year-old woman had been identified as a high-risk contact of
another Ebola case in Beni, more than 700 km north, last month,
according to a government statement issued on Friday.
She traveled by bus, boat and road with her two children to Mwenga,
in South Kivu, where she died on Tuesday night, according to a slide
from a presentation by health officials.
The woman had been vaccinated, the slide said. The Ebola response
team, headed by the Congolese government, identified 120 contacts
and vaccinated 20 on Thursday, the slide showed.
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The latest cases show the difficulty of containing the latest Ebola
outbreak, which has continued to spread in eastern Congo despite the
deployment of a highly effective vaccine.
Last month, it reached the region's largest city of Goma, home to
nearly two million people on the Rwandan border.
Ebola treatment centers have repeatedly been attacked by armed
militiamen and disgruntled locals, hampering efforts to contain the
epidemic in the conflict-ravaged east.
(Reporting by Djaffar Al-Katanty,; Writing by Anna Pujol-Mazzini,;
Editing by Edward McAllister and Stephen Powell
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