According to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, scores of people have died from an enigmatic illness that resembles the flu.
As of Tuesday, the nation’s Ministry of Public Health, Hygiene, and Social Security said that the unnamed disease has killed 79 individuals and sickened 376.
The ministry claimed in a statement on X that the sickness was of “still unknown origin” and had been found in the southern Congo’s Kwango region.
Fever, headache, congestion of the nose, cough, dyspnea, and anemia are among the symptoms that have been reported.
The death toll might reach 143, local officials said Reuters and The Associated Press.
In addition to asking people to report any suspicious illnesses or unexpected deaths, the health ministry stated that the remains of anybody who passed away after exhibiting similar symptoms should not be handled without the assistance of authorized health officials. The office also suggested that individuals stay away from large crowds and follow basic hygiene guidelines, such as washing their hands with soap and water.
According to the ministry, emergency public health personnel have been sent to the area.
The World Health Organization is collaborating with local authorities and is aware of reports of an unnamed sickness, the organization informed NBC News.
In an email, WHO spokeswoman Tarik Jašarević stated, “We have sent a team to the remote area to collect samples for lab investigations.”
A fast reaction team sent by a local emergency operations center is receiving technical help from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which maintains an office in Congo and is aware of the problem.
According to Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist from the University of California, Los Angeles who has been working in Congo since 2002, the lack of adequate health care infrastructure and the fact that some of the population suffers from underlying medical conditions like malaria and malnutrition may make it more difficult to diagnose the illnesses.
“I believe it’s critical to understand what’s going on, but it’s equally critical to hold off on panicking until we have more information,” she stated.
“Anything could be it,” she said. “There are several possible causes, including measles, influenza, Ebola, Marburg, and meningitis. We just don’t know at this time.
The epidemic “does raise alarm bells” due to its location, according to Stanford Medicine infectious disease specialist Dr. Abraar Karan. According to him, “many animal infections that transmit from animal to human can cause pretty severe disease,” and human-wildlife interactions in Congo raise the possibility of a pathogen spreading from animals.
Before testing for less common diseases, local health experts would first screen for common ailments like malaria or the flu in order to identify the condition, according to Karan. Officials may genetically sequence bone marrow, mucous, tissue, or blood from sick individuals if all of those tests come back negative, he added.
According to Amira Albert Roess, a professor of global health and epidemiology at George Mason University, multinational teams on the ground would simultaneously gather data about the risk factors that sick patients have shared and the people they have interacted with.
Roess stated that there had been “many deaths, especially in such a short amount of time, with the same types of symptoms,” and that “I think pretty quickly we’ll start to have an answer as to what this is.”
