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Bloomberg
A Congolese health official said two more cases of Ebola have been identified in Mbandaka in northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo.
There are now three confirmed cases of the disease in the city, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director-general of the National Institute for Biomedical Research, said by phone Friday from the capital, Kinshasa. Health Ministry spokeswoman Jessica Ilunga said she couldn’t immediately confirm the higher number, after the ministry reported the first confirmed case of the disease there on May 16.
Mbandaka is home to about 1.2 million people and situated on the Congo River, which links the area to Kinshasa, with about 12 million residents, and Brazzaville, the capital of neighboring Republic of Congo. The viral illness has spread to Mbandaka from the remote town of Bikoro, where an outbreak was confirmed on May 8. Thirteen cases have been confirmed around Bikoro, according to the ministry.
Twenty-five people are suspected to have died from the disease so far. The outbreak doesn’t qualify as an international emergency, Robert Steffen, chairman of the World Health Organization’s Emergency Committee, said on a conference call in Geneva.
“It was the view of the committee that the conditions for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern have not currently been met,†the WHO said on its Twitter account. The current outbreak is the ninth occurrence of Ebola in Congo since it was first discovered in the central African nation in 1976.