A mysterious illness in northwestern Congo has claimed the lives of more than 50 people since January, health officials have said.
The disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo began on January 21 and has seen 419 cases and 53 deaths, though the cause behind it remains unclear.
It has also not yet emerged whether the cases, which have been discovered in two villages in Congo's Equateur province, are connected as the distance between them stretches over 120 miles.
Early cases
Some of the first victims were three children, who passed away in one of the villages, Boloko, after they had eaten a bat. They died 48 hours later, the Africa office of the World Health Organisation confirmed on Monday, but no causal link between the bat and the outbreak has been confirmed.
In nearly half of the cases, this window of time between the onset of symptoms - which include fever, chills, body aches and diarrhea - and death has been the same, passing away within hours after they felt sick.
"That's what's really worrying," said Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital, a regional monitoring centre.
Following these initial cases, more infections were found in the village, Bomate, where at least some of the patients reportedly also had malaria. This is also the region where more than 400 people have fallen ill.
Dr Ngalebato said of the two villages: "The first one with a lot of deaths, that we continue to investigate because it's an unusual situation, (and) in the second episode that we're dealing with, we see a lot of the cases of malaria.”
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) Africa office said urgent action was needed "to accelerate laboratory investigations, improve case management and isolation capacities, and strengthen surveillance and risk communication”.
Possible causes
Congo's Ministry of Health flagged that roughly 80 per cent of patients share similar symptoms of fever, chills, body aches and diarrhoea.
While these can be signs of numerous common infections, health officials have ruled out hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola, Marburg and similar illnesses after test samples were collected.
The WHO said it continues to investigate an array of possible causes. These include:
Congo's government says experts were deployed to the villages on February 14, mainly to help investigate the cases and slow the spread, and according to Dr. Ngalebato, patients have been responding to treatments.
Forests and epidemics
Concerns about diseases jumping from animals to humans in places where wild animals are popularly eaten have been raised for a long period of time. The number of such outbreaks in Africa has surged by more than 60 per cent in the last decade, the WHO said in 2022.
Experts suggest the same could be happening in Congo, which is home to about 60 per cent of the forests in the Congo Basin - which itself is home to the largest expanse of tropical forest on our planet.
"All these viruses are viruses that have reservoirs in the forest. And so, as long as we have these forests, we will always have a few epidemics with viruses which will mutate," said Gabriel Nsakala, a professor of public health at Congo's National Pedagogical University.
