United States: Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo are working quickly to figure out what is actually causing a flu-like illness that has made 376 people sick and led to 79 deaths. The illness was like the first found in Kwango province, in the southwestern part of the country. The cause of the disease is still unknown, according to the Congo Ministry of Public Health.
The information notice said symptoms experienced by infector involve fever, headache, nasal congestion, cough, difficulty in breathing and anemia.
As reported by HealthDay, Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Medicine, said NBC News that the Congo outbreak “does raise alarm bells” because of that. There is close human-animal contact there and that potentially increases the likelihood that a pathogen jumping from animals to people, he further said.
“A lot of the zoonotic diseases which are cross-over from animal to human can lead to quite serious illness,” Karan also said.
To attempt to identify what germ is responsible for the illnesses, local health officers will begin with tests and samples for more conventional diseases like flu or malaria, before proceeding with tests for more exotic pathogens, he added. If those tests are negative officials can carry out the test commonly known as PCR where cells from the affected organ of the infected persons, blood, mucus, or bone marrow are genetically sequenced.
However, Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA, who has worked in Congo since 2002, stated that such actions might not be easy since Congo has a very bad health care system and some residents of the country have other health related problems such as malaria and malnutrition.
The presenter, who is expecting her fourth child, said: “I think it is very important to observe what is going on, but we should not yet panic, as far as I understand what is happening.”
“It could be anything,” the woman said further. It could be influenza; it could be Ebola; it could be Marburg; it could be meningitis; it could be measles.” ‘‘At this point we just’’’ simply do not know”.
They stated other health authorities stated they are trying with Congo officials to confirm the infection that got the outbreak going.
According to the World Health Organization spokesperson Tarik Jašarević in his interview with NBC News, “we have sent a team to the concerned region for samples collections towards investigations.”