The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) said Monday that an outbreak of a mysterious disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has killed 53 people since it began on January 21.
The outbreak appears to have begun after three children in the village of Boloko ate a bat.
Regional medical officials described the mystery illness as a haemorrhagic fever, like Ebola and the Marburg virus, but it has characteristics distinct from those infamous diseases. Tests of the victims came up negative for Ebola, Marburg, and yellow fever.
The new disease is fast-moving and frequently lethal. Regional doctors said the interval between first symptoms and death has been averaging 48 hours. The early symptoms include vomiting, high fever, and internal bleeding.
As of February 15, 431 cases of the disease had been confirmed across the DRC’s Equateur province, a vast and lightly populated region along the Congo River. The fatality rate of the outbreak works out to 12.3 percent.
W.H.O. noted that the “remote location and weak healthcare infrastructure” of the area increased the risk of disease transmission.
The initial outbreak in the village of Boloko was followed by infections in a nearby village called Danda, and then a much larger outbreak in the village of Bomate.
Investigators believe the first three cases were a trio of children under age 5 who became sick after eating the carcass of a bat. Bats have been fingered as suspects in the murky origins of the Wuhan coronavirus, among other diseases.
The three children who ate the bat died between January 10 and 13, and were reportedly bleeding from their noses and vomiting blood before they succumbed to the disease. Four more children between the ages of 5 and 18 in Boloko died within the next two weeks, by which time the larger secondary outbreak in Bomate was underway.
Pending further tests, W.H.O. said it could not be certain if the two outbreaks were directly related, but called for “immediate high-level intervention” to be sure the mysterious illness does not spread further.