Ebola outbreak declared over in DRC province
There have been no new cases reported of the deadly haemorrhagic disease in 42 days
Kinshasa — On Tuesday, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) officially declared the end of an outbreak of Ebola, bringing the curtain down on a 10-week re-emergence of the disease, which claimed 33 lives. Health minister Oly Ilunga declared the epidemic over in a statement, saying there had been no new confirmed cases during 42 days of observation. The outbreak — the ninth in the DRC since 1976 — began in the remote northwestern area of Bikoro, where the first cases were recorded on May 8. The news triggered a wave of international concern, which increased after cases emerged in the city of Mbandaka, a city and transport hub on the Congo River with a population of more than one-million. For many experts, that ranked among worst-case scenarios — contagious disease in an urban setting is far harder to contain than in the countryside, especially in a poor country with a fragile health system. The same strain of the highly contagious disease struck the West African states of Guinea, L...
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