Dr Head said of the current outbreak, which had killed 53 at the latest update: ‘The contact tracing, where public health teams try to find people who may have been exposed to a case, will be vital here in gaining control of this outbreak.’.
A further outbreak of Ebola killed 2,299 people in eastern DRC between 2018 and 2020, while Marburg has killed at least 56 people in neighbouring countries in the last two years.
Dr Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, told Metro that while it is possible this is an entirely new virus, it is more likely that it is a bug we already know about but haven’t yet managed to identify.
Dr Head said: ‘The spread of cases across two health districts suggests that it would be more likely to be an infectious disease, than perhaps a chemical or environmental contamination.
Last year, World Health Organisation boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that a future Disease X could ‘wreak havoc across the globe because people have failed to learn lessons from previous pandemics’.
