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There's a New Outbreak of Ebola In the Congo, and the UN Is Trying to Contain It
Health workers carry out the body of a patient with unconfirmed Ebola virus on August 22, 2018 in Mangina, near Beni, in the North Kivu province. - Sixty-one people have died in the latest outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the authorities said, adding that four novel drugs had been added to the roster of treatments. The outbreak began on August 1 in Mangina, the epicentre of the outbreak in the North Kivu province, and cases have been reported in neighbouring Ituri province. It is the 10th outbreak to strike the DRC since 1976, when Ebola was first identified and named after a river in the north of the country. (Photo by John WESSELS / AFP)

The Ebolavirus conjures up gruesome images of infected individuals with hemorrhages erupting all over the body. When the virus was first discovered during an outbreak in 1976 in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), the extreme lethality of the virus assisted physicians in containing the spread of the disease. The symptoms would present early enough that emergency responders could easily separate and quarantine the infected from the healthy.

More recent Ebolavirus outbreaks, however, such as the Western African outbreak between 2014 and 2016, have been more difficult to contain because the disease did not present indications of infection as early in exposed individuals, where the predicted incubation time could be doubled from 1-21 days to 1-42 days post-exposure. And new findings indicated the persistence of the Ebolavirus in the sexual fluids of survivors, which suggested Ebolavirus could be further expanded into a sexually transmitted disease. Thus, infected persons could travel greater distances away from the initial point of contact with the virus and potentially spread the virus over a wider area.

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