Ebola Archives - Iran News Daily

War and Ebola: A double nightmare in eastern DR Congo

reporter 1222 — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 08:40:02 +0000

First came the war, which developed into a brutal, bloody tussle between militias who abused civilians or killed them.

Now Ebola, a name almost as dreaded as death itself, has come.

In the Beni region, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern province of Kivu, the twin peril has bred fear and despair.

The region is haunted in particular by the Allied Defence Forces (ADF), a Ugandan Islamist rebel group blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths over the past four years.

On August 1, Beni declared an outbreak of Ebola epicentered in Mangina — a small town that had been a relative haven from the fighting — where six members of the same family died of the disease.

“I fled here from Kokola, where the ADF were committing atrocities,” said Pascaline Fitina, a 36-year-old woman, sitting alone, her head in her hands.

“I went to my elder sister, but she has died of Ebola and her husband is being quarantined at the treatment centre. I don’t what to do.”

Pascal Lukula, a 38-year-old farmer with five children, said he was stuck in Mangina, unable to get to other members of his family, because of the encroaching militia.

“We are caught between the hammer and the anvil,” he sighed. “The ADF’s on one side, and Ebola on the other.”

The Congolese health ministry said Wednesday the death toll in the east had reached 42 out of 66 probable and confirmed cases.

The outbreak — the country’s 10th since the disease was discovered in then-Zaire in 1976 — was announced just a week after the end of an Ebola flareup in northwestern Equateur province that claimed 33 lives.

– Chlorinated water –

Ebola causes serious illness including vomiting, diarrhoea and in some cases internal and external bleeding. It is often fatal if untreated.

The disease is caused by a virus that is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads among humans through close contact with the blood, body fluids, secretions or organs of an infected person.

In Mangina, located 30 kilometres (18 miles) southwest of the city of Beni, suspicion and rumour seem to have spread across the population.

Containers of chlorinated water have been installed in front of all shops and in the markets to provide rudimentary hand protection.

“I wear gloves to protect me from the epidemic,” said Jonas Mumbere, 26, who drives a motorcycle taxi.

“Customers have started to think twice about getting on the motorbike for fear of contamination.”

Elodie Zena, a 28-year-old sex worker, said, “Business has dropped off — customers are afraid. I’ve heard that even the sweat of someone who is infected can contaminate us. I’ve got two children and I don’t how I can feed them.”

Health experts have long fretted about the problems of combating Ebola in the DRC, a vast country that is poor and unstable and shares boundaries with nine countries.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also warned that conflict had helped create “a conducive environment for the transmission” of Ebola.

Hanna Leskinen of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said the grassroots work in combating Ebola lies in locating and treating patients and isolating people who have been in contact with them.

In North Kivu, “people are moving around all the time, fleeing the latest wave of violence,” she said. “It enormously complicates search and followup of infected people.”

Another worry is for the safety of health workers — “the police and army are providing night-and-day security” for them, said North Kivu’s governor, Ephrem Kasereka.

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West African states in joint fight against root crop ‘Ebola’

reporter 1222 — Sun, 08 Jul 2018 11:10:04 +0000

Researchers from half a dozen states in West Africa have joined together in a battle against what one expert calls a root crop “Ebola” — a viral disease that could wreck the region’s staple food and condemn millions to hunger.

Their enemy: cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), a virus that strikes cassava, also called manioc, which in some of the region’s countries is consumed by as many as 80 percent of the population.

The root-rotting disease was first discovered in Tanzania eight decades ago and is steadily moving westward.

“In outbreaks in central Africa, it has wiped out between 90 and 100 percent of cassava production — it’s now heading towards West Africa,” Justin Pita, in charge of the research programme, told AFP.

“It is a very big threat. It has to be taken very seriously.”

In Uganda, 3,000 people died of hunger in the 1990s after the dreaded disease showed up, striking small farmers in particular.

“You can call it the Ebola of cassava,” said Pita.

The West African Virus Epidemiology (WAVE) project, a multi-million-dollar scheme funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to shield the region from the advancing peril.

Headquartered at Bingerville, on the edges of the Ivorian economic capital Abidjan, it gathers six countries from West Africa — Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Togo — as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Much is already known about CBSD — the virus is generally believed to be propagated by an insect called the silverleaf whitefly, and also through cuttings taken from infected plants.

But there remain gaps in knowledge about West Africa’s specific vulnerabilities to the disease.

They include understanding the susceptibility of local strains of cassava to the virus, and identifying points in the cassava trade that can help a localised outbreak of CBSD swell into an epidemic.

The scheme will also look at initiatives to help boost yield — a key challenge in a region with surging population growth.

“The current average yield from cassava (in West Africa) is 10 to 12 tonnes per hectare (four to 4.8 tonnes per acre), but it has the potential to reach 40 tonnes a hectare,” said Odile Attanasso, Benin’s minister of higher education and scientific research.

“In Asia, they have yields of 22 tonnes per hectare.”

– ‘Attieke is our husband’ –

The WAVE project hopes to go beyond the lab and test fields, though.

It also wants to harness the clout of community leaders and chiefs to spread CBSD awareness and promote better farming practices, such as confining and destroying crops in infested areas and banning transport of manioc cuttings.

“We kings and traditional chiefs are the interface between the population and the government,” said Amon Tanoe, the ceremonial monarch of the coastal Grand-Bassam region in Ivory Coast.

Ivory Coast is a huge consumer of cassava — the starchy root is typically pulped and fermented and served in a side dish called attieke.

In Affery, a big cassava-growing region about 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of the economic capital Abidjan, makers of attieke said they were deeply worried about the threat of CBSD.

“Attieke is our husband,” said Nathalie Monet Apo, head of the association of attieke producers, emphasising how the cassava dish is intertwined with Ivorian life.

“If the disease shows up, it would be dramatic for our families and our community.”

“They have to find a cure for this disease — it’s thanks to growing cassava that I am able to provide an education for my four children,” said Blandine Yapo Sopi, eyeing a mound of harvested manioc that she hoped would bring in 450,000 CFA francs (nearly 700 euros, around $800).

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Ultra-secure lab in Gabon equipped for Ebola studies

reporter 1222 — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 11:50:31 +0000

At a research facility in Gabon, one isolated building stands behind an electrified fence, under round-the-clock scrutiny by video cameras. The locked-down P4 lab is built to handle the world’s most dangerous viruses, including Ebola.

“Only four people, three researchers and a technician, are authorised to go inside the P4,” said virologist Illich Mombo, who is in charge of the lab, one of only two in all of Africa that is authorised to handle deadly Ebola, Marburg and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever viruses. The other is in Johannesburg.

The P4 was put up 800 metres (half a mile) distant from older buildings of the Franceville International Centre for Medical Research (CIRMF), in large grounds on the outskirts of Franceville, the chief city in the southeastern Haut-Ogooue province.

Filming the ultra-high-security lab or even taking photos is banned and the handful of people allowed inside have security badges. Backup power plants ensure an uninterruptable electricity supply. “Even the air that we breathe is filtered,” Mombo explains.

When he goes into the P4 lab to work on a sample of suspect virus such as Ebola — which has claimed 28 lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during an outbreak in the past six weeks — Mombo wears a head-to-foot biohazard suit.

The special clothing is destroyed as soon as he has finished. Draconian measures are in force to prevent any risk of contamination, with potentially disastrous effects.

– ‘Teams on alert’ –

Once a suspect virus has been “inactivated” — a technique that stops the sample from being contagious — it is carefully taken from the P4 unit to other CIRMF laboratories in the compound, where it is analysed.

Specialised teams will scrutinise it, looking to confirm its strain of Ebola and hunting for clues such as the virus’s ancestry and evolution, which are vital for tracking the spread of the disease.

CIRMF director Jean-Sylvain Koumba, a colonel in the Gabonese army and a military doctor, said lab teams had been “placed on alert” to handle Ebola samples sent on by the National Institute of Biomedical Resarch in the DRC capital Kinshasa.

The nature of the sample can be determined with rare precision, for the facility has state-of-the-art equipment matched in few other places worldwide.

“On average, it takes 24 to 48 hours between the time when a sample arrives and when we get the results,” Mombo said.

Founded in 1979 by Gabon’s late president Omar Bongo Ondimba to study national fertility rates, the CIRMF moved on to AIDS, malaria, cancer, viral diseases and the neglected tropical maladies that affect a billion people around the world, according to the WHO.

The centre is financed by the Gabonese state, whose main wealth is derived from oil exports, and gets help from France.

In all, 150 people work for the CIRMF and live on the huge premises. Its reputation draws scientists, students and apprentices from Asia, Europe and the United States, as well as Africa.

“(The) CIRMF is uniquely suited to study infectious diseases of the Congolese tropical rain forest, the second world’s largest rain forest,” two French scientists, Eric Leroy and Jean-Paul Gonzalez, wrote in the specialist journal Viruses in 2012.

“(It) is dedicated to conduct medical research of the highest standard … with unrivalled infrastructure, multiple sites and multidisciplinary teams.”

– Animal ‘reservoir’? –

The facility also conducts investigations into how lethal tropical pathogens are able to leap the species barrier, said Gael Darren Maganga, who helps run the unit studying the emergence of viral diseases.

“A passive watch consists of taking a sample from a dead animal after a request, while the active watch is when we go out ourselves to do fieldwork and take samples,” he said.

A major centre of interest is the bat, seen as a potential “reservoir” — a natural haven — for the Ebola virus, said Maganga. Staff regularly go out all over Gabon to take samples of saliva, faecal matter and blood.

The consumption of monkey flesh and other bush meat is common practice in central Africa.

“It’s still a hypothesis, but the transmission to human beings could be by direct contact, for instance by getting scratches (from a bat) in caves, or by handling apes which have been infected by bat saliva,” he said.

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