Ebola kills four in Guinea in first resurgence of disease in five years

Four people have died of Ebola in Guinea in the first resurgence of the disease in five years, the health minister said on Saturday.

Remy Lamah told AFP officials were “really concerned” about the deaths, the first since a 2013-16 epidemic – which began in Guinea – left 11,300 dead across the region.

One of the latest victims in Guinea was a nurse who fell ill in late January and was buried on 1 February, National Health Security Agency head Sakoba Keita told local media. “Among those who took part in the burial, eight people showed symptoms: diarrhoea, vomiting and bleeding,” he said. “Three of them died and four others are in hospital.”

The four deaths from Ebola hemorrhagic fever occurred in the south-east region of Nzerekore, he said.

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Keita also told local media that one patient had “escaped” but had been found and hospitalised in the capital Conakry. He confirmed the comments to AFP without giving further detail.

The World Health Organization has eyed each new outbreak since 2016 with great concern, treating the most recent one in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as an international health emergency.

DRC has faced several outbreak of the illness, with the WHO on Thursday confirming a resurgence three months after authorities declared the end of the country’s latest outbreak.

The country had declared the six-month epidemic over in November. It was the country’s 11th Ebola outbreak, claiming 55 lives out of 130 cases.

The widespread use of vaccinations, which were administered to more than 40,000 people, helped curb the disease.

The 2013-16 outbreak sped up the development of a vaccine against Ebola, with a global emergency stockpile of 500,000 doses planned to respond quickly to future outbreaks, the vaccine alliance Gavi said in January.