Ebola vaccine doses arrive in east Congo after new case confirmed

[August 24, 2022]  DAKAR (Reuters) - More than 200 Ebola vaccine doses have been brought to the Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern city of Beni, where a new case of the virus was confirmed this week, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.

The latest confirmed case has been genetically linked to a 2018-2020 outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, which claimed nearly 2,300 lives.

Six people were killed in another flare-up from that same outbreak last year.

The jabs arrived in Beni on Tuesday and vaccination is due to begin "very shortly", WHO Congo said on Twitter, without providing a timeline or specifying where the shots were from.

A WHO spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Congo's dense tropical forests are a natural reservoir for the Ebola virus, which causes fever, body aches, and diarrhoea, and can linger in the body of survivors only to resurface years later.

A Congolese boy walks past a wall in Beni, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

The vast central African country has recorded 14 outbreaks since 1976. The 2018-2020 outbreak in the east was Congo's largest and the second largest ever recorded, with nearly 3,500 total cases.

The most recent outbreak was in Congo's northwest Equateur province and declared over in July after five deaths.

(Reporting by Sofia Christensen; Editing by James Macharia Chege)

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