The hunt for Ebola virus infections and contact cases continues in Africa.
In Côte d'Ivoire, the World Health Organization (WHO) indicates on Tuesday that in addition to the confirmed case of contamination already detected in the country, one suspected case and nine contact cases have been identified and are being followed up.
“Regarding the numbers, there are two cases.
One that has been confirmed - a young woman, and there is also a suspected case, ”confirmed Tarik Jasarevic, WHO spokesperson, during a press briefing in Geneva.
"There are currently nine identified contact cases," he added.
The case of Ebola hemorrhagic fever contamination was detected on Saturday in Abidjan in an 18-year-old Guinean girl, who arrived in Côte d'Ivoire on August 11 from the Guinean city of Labé, a journey of more than 1,500 km that she did by road.
The patient is currently undergoing treatment in a hospital in Abidjan.
This contamination led Guinea to launch a search for contact cases, in the event that the patient was infected there.
“We don't know where the contamination took place.
If it is here in Labé, if it is outside Labé, in particular during the journey which took it to Côte d'Ivoire via Forest Guinea ”, in N'Zérékoré, underlines the prefectural director of Health (DPS) of Labé, Dr Mamadou Hady Diallo.
A vaccination campaign launched in Abidjan
The WHO considered "extremely worrying" that this case was declared in Abidjan, a metropolis of more than four million inhabitants, two months after the announcement of the end of the epidemic of 2021 in Guinea.
“Regarding the first investigations on the genetic sequence of the Ebola virus which was identified in Abidjan, for the moment we have no indication that this outbreak in Côte d'Ivoire has a link with the Ebola epidemic which raged in Guinea earlier this year, ”notes Tarik Jasarevic.
"We need to do other laboratory investigations to find out if there is a link with any previous epidemic", in particular with the one that hit Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia hard between the end of 2013 and 2016, a- he added.
The spokesperson, however, specified that the first results show "that it is probably the Zaire strain of the virus", namely the subtype of Ebola virus which plagued Guinea this year as well as during the great epidemic in West Africa.
Although Côte d'Ivoire shares borders with Guinea and Liberia, the country had not recorded any confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease since 1994, the year a scientist was infected during an epidemic among chimpanzees, according to the WHO.
A vaccination campaign was launched Monday in Abidjan.
