This is also the region where more than 400 people have fallen ill. Dr Ngalebato said of the two villages: "The first one with a lot of deaths, that we continue to investigate because it's an unusual situation, (and) in the second episode that we're dealing with, we see a lot of the cases of malaria.”.
Experts suggest the same could be happening in Congo, which is home to about 60 per cent of the forests in the Congo Basin - which itself is home to the largest expanse of tropical forest on our planet.
Congo's Ministry of Health flagged that roughly 80 per cent of patients share similar symptoms of fever, chills, body aches and diarrhoea.
Congo's government says experts were deployed to the villages on February 14, mainly to help investigate the cases and slow the spread, and according to Dr. Ngalebato, patients have been responding to treatments.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) Africa office said urgent action was needed "to accelerate laboratory investigations, improve case management and isolation capacities, and strengthen surveillance and risk communication”.
