A doctor returning from a humanitarian mission in Congo has tested positive for Ebola in France, the country’s first case of the virus during the current outbreak, the health ministry said on Wednesday.
The patient is being isolated and authorities are contact tracing, the ministry said in a statement, adding that the risk for the general European population was low.
Congo’s Ebola outbreak, which has infected more than 1,000 people and killed 267, has had the largest number of confirmed cases within the first month of any episode of the disease, the World Health Organisation has said.
Children have made up 15 per cent of confirmed cases and over 25 per cent of deaths since the outbreak in April, and are almost twice as likely to die as adults, according to the UN Children’s Fund, Unicef.
The disease causes a prolonged high fever, joint or body pain, nausea, diarrhea and dehydration, rash and in some cases bleeding. There is no specific medicine for Ebola, though early treatment can improve survival odds.
Abdirahman Mahamud, a senior WHO official, told reporters in Geneva this week that the scale of the outbreak was due to the disease’s presence in built up urban areas, where historically they have been first identified in rural areas and contained quickly.
“What is important is we need to scale up and this outbreak is moving faster than us,” he told reporters, after returning from Bunia last week.
The two largest previous Ebola outbreaks were one in West Africa, in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, which killed 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016, and a less fatal outbreak in Congo in 2018.
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