Africa’s top health agency announced Thursday it would roll out a vaccine for a previous Ebola strain to counter the latest devastating outbreak in the DR Congo.
The virus, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids and causes haemorrhagic fever, has killed over 1,800 people out of the nearly 4,000 confirmed cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo since authorities officially declared an outbreak on May 15.
The Bundibugyo variant of the virus has spread across five provinces in the vast country’s mineral-rich, conflict-plagued east and northeast, leaving scientists scrambling to find a vaccine for the new variant.
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said it would dispense a vaccine developed for the Zaire Ebola strain, the deadliest of the known strains of the virus.
Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa CDC, said while people vaccinated against the Zaire strain experienced some symptoms, “we saw zero death among people who are vaccinated”.
“It means there is a level of protection,” he told an online news conference, saying that the vaccine would be offered to all those in eastern provinces of Ituri and North Kivu.
He did not specify how many doses of the vaccine were available.
He added that they would also expand the use of redemsevir -- citing the success of Ugandan authorities, who recently said they had cleared the country of Ebola.
“If the case fatality rate in Uganda... is 10 percent it’s mostly because they used redemsevir,” he said.
Uganda announced in mid-July that it no longer had any active cases of Ebola, the last recorded patient having been discharged from hospital after recovering.
Uganda’s health ministry said it had recorded 20 confirmed cases, and two patients had died, while all the others had recovered.
