WHO sends team to DR Congo as mystery illness kills 71

The World Health Organization has sent a team to study a mystery illness in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that local authorities say has killed at least 71 people.

The country’s health ministry said it could share little information about the disease except that hundreds of people have so far been affected and most of the deaths were recorded among people aged under 18. Patients are typically experiencing flu-like symptoms, including fever, headaches, runny noses and coughs, breathing difficulties and anaemia, the BBC reported.1

Jean Kaseya, head of Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on 5 December that local authorities were expecting to receive results from laboratory samples in the next 48 hours that could help shed light on the nature of the disease and how it was spreading.

“First diagnostics are leading us to think it is a respiratory disease,” Kaseya told reporters.2

The health ministry has reported 71 confirmed deaths from the illness, including 27 people who died in hospitals and 44 in the community in Kwango province. Response teams have been sent to the southern part of the country where the illness has been reported, to treat patients and investigate the nature of the disease.

Health authorities do not understand how the disease is transmitted but have urged people to wash their hands with soap, avoid mass gatherings, and avoid touching the bodies of the deceased. The health ministry said it was “on general alert” but asked the public for calm.

WHO told The BMJ it was working with national authorities to study and contain the disease but was unable to disclose any further information. “We have dispatched a team to the area to collect samples for laboratory investigations,” a WHO spokesperson said.

An MP in the Kwango region told a local radio station that 67 people had become sick and later died between 10 and 26 November, the BBC reported. “It should be noted that Panzi Hospital is short of medicines to cope with this epidemic. We really need assistance,” the MP said.

The country’s health system was already overstretched, and malnutrition is as high as 40% in the countryside, which is driving up the number of deaths from the mystery illness.

Ten of the people who died in hospitals succumbed to the disease because of a lack of blood supplies for a transfusion, and 17 died from respiratory problems, health minister Roger Kamba said. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is simultaneously dealing with one of Africa’s largest outbreaks of mpox, with more than 21 000 suspected cases and 700 deaths reported between January and August this year.3

Dieudonne Mwamba, head of the National Institute for Public Health, said the remote nature of the Kwango region has slowed down the work of health authorities. It took epidemiologists two days to arrive there, and samples had to be taken to Kikwit, a city more than 500 km away, because of the lack of testing capacity, Mwamba said.