The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday confirmed that a second Ebola case has been recorded in Democratic Republic of Congo.
“So far there are 19 suspect cases, including three deaths and two lab-confirmed cases,” a WHO spokesperson in Geneva said via e-mail.
The first case was confirmed on Friday in Bas-Uele province in the north-east.
WHO has said the outbreak appears to be limited to that remote area, and that there is no need for travel restrictions for the time being.
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, a continent-wide mechanism to monitor disease outbreaks, said it had activated its emergency operational centre to monitor the situation in Congo.
The Central African country has suffered seven previous outbreaks of Ebola since the virus was discovered in the country in 1976.
The last outbreak, in 2014, left 49 people dead.
The haemorrhagic fever has been most detrimental in West Africa, where it claimed more than 11,000 lives in 2014 to 2015.
WHO declared Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the three countries that had been most affected by the epidemic, free of Ebola in 2016.
The GAVI global vaccine alliance said on Friday some 300,000 emergency doses of an Ebola vaccine developed by Merck (MRK.N) could be available in case of a large-scale outbreak.
The vaccine, known as “rVSV-ZEBOV”, was shown to be highly protective against Ebola in clinical trials published in December 2016.
They added teams are ready to support the Congo government on the matter.
The virus is highly contagious and as a result can spread quickly between victims.
It is fatal in around 90 per cent of cases, and during the West African outbreak mortality varied between 25 per cent and 90 per cent.
The virus has an incubation period of two to 21 days, meaning symptoms can take up to three weeks to appear.
