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Ebola case reported near S.Sudan border: health official
JUBA, July 3, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – South Sudan has stepped up surveillance
along its porous southern border after an Ebola case was detected just inside
DR Congo, an health official in Juba told AFP Wednesday.
The case of the deadly virus was confirmed in Ariwara, in Congo’s
northeastern Ituri province, just 70 kilometres (43 miles) from the frontier
with Yei River State in South Sudan.
It is the closest Ebola is known to have come to South Sudan since a major
outbreak began in Congo last August.
Dr Pinyi Nyimol, the director general of South Sudan’s Disease Control and
Emergency Response Centre, said a team of reinforcements had been sent to the
region to bolster surveillance after the case was confirmed.
“We are very worried because it is coming nearer, and people are on the
move so contact (with Ebola) could cross to South Sudan,” he told AFP.
South Sudan has already declared a state of high alert and vaccinated
health workers.
There are screening centres at border crossings in high-risk areas and an
Ebola treatment unit and laboratory in the capital Juba, Nyimol said.
But the world’s youngest country is considered particularly vulnerable to
the notorious virus.
Years of ruinous civil war have left its health system in tatters.
The border with the Democratic Republic of Congo has many unofficial
crossing points, posing challenges for detection.
Fighting in and around Yei River State since September has also driven
nearly 20,000 civilians into DR Congo and Uganda, both countries that have
detected Ebola.
The outbreak in the eastern Congo provinces of North Kivu and Ituri has
already claimed more than 1,500 lives since August.
Two people also died in Uganda in June after a family returned from
eastern Congo where they buried an Ebola-stricken relative.
Ebola spreads among humans through close contact with the blood, body
fluids, secretions or organs of an infected person, or objects contaminated
by such fluids.
BSS/AFP/SSS/1937 hrs