The Africa CDC has reported at least five Ebola deaths in Guinea and two in DR Congo.
The World Health Organization said it has alerted six countries around the two to prepare and be ready, and to look for any potential infection.
Kenya is not among those notified and the risk for spread here appears low. There was an Ebola scare in Kenya in 2019, but the victim tested negative.
Ebola is caused by a deadly virus that causes fever, body aches, and diarrhoea, and sometimes bleeding inside and outside the body.
As the virus spreads through the body, it damages the immune system and organs. Ultimately, it causes levels of blood-clotting cells to drop. This leads to severe, uncontrollable bleeding.
It kills up to 90 per cent of people who are infected.
Symptoms include fever, fatigue, muscle pain, headache and sore throat.
Unlike the coronavirus, the Ebola virus does not spread until a patient develops symptoms—an asymptomatic Covid-19 person can infect those around them.
Supportive care includes rehydration with oral or intravenous fluids - and treatment of specific symptoms improves survival.
There is as yet no proven treatment available for Ebola. However, a range of potential treatments, including blood products, immune therapies and drug therapies, are currently being evaluated.
WHO said in the 2018-2019 Ebola outbreak in DRC, the first-ever multi-drug randomised control trial was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of drugs used in the treatment of Ebola patients under an ethical framework developed in consultation with experts in the field and the DRC.
In December 2016, a study found the VSV-EBOV vaccine to be 95–100 per cent effective against the Ebola virus, making it the first proven vaccine against the disease. The approval was supported by a study conducted in Guinea during the 2014–2016 outbreak in individuals 18 years of age and older.
In 2019, the WHO prequalified the injectable Ebola vaccine.
The VSV-ZEBOV vaccine, however, does not provide protection against other species of Ebolavirus or Marburgvirus. Since evaluation of clinical efficacy and immunogenicity have not been conducted in the same study, it is not possible to define a correlate of protection at the individual level.
It is not known how long rVSV-ZEBOV protects against EBOV, and whether it is effective when administered concurrently with antiviral medication, immune globulin, and/or blood or plasma transfusion.
In early February at least 15 people died of a mysterious illness whose victims vomited blood in southern Tanzania. More than 50 others were hospitalised.
According to BBC, the country Health ministry said it had sent experts to investigate but ruled out an epidemic.
