Hemorrhagic Fever in Congo; Ebola Feared Cause

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Thursday December 6 3:56 PM ET (via Yahoo)

Hemorrhagic Fever Kills 17 in Congo, Ebola Feared

KINSHASA (Reuters) - An outbreak of hemorrhagic fever which doctors
suspect could be the deadly Ebola virus has killed 17 people in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, the health ministry said on Thursday.

It was the second feared outbreak of Ebola this week after six people
died of a mystery illness in another Central African country, Gabon.

An adviser to the ministry said a team of epidemiologists had been
sent to the town of Misangandu, in Congo's western Kasai province,
where 30 cases of haemorrhagic fever had been detected over the past
three weeks.

Victims of Ebola, named after the river in the former Zaire where it
was first discovered in 1976, bleed to death in a matter of days.
There is no known cure and no vaccine.

`We sent a team today ... to investigate in what state people are
dying and how contagious the disease is,'' Doctor Mobile Kampanga
told reporters in the capital Kinshasa.

`We are used to epidemics in this country... This is the land of
epidemics. But it's still serious,'' he said.

Health infrastructure in Congo, Africa's third largest country with a
population of about 54 million, has been devastated by three years of
civil war.

Ebola, which is passed on through contact with body fluids and begins
with aches and fever similar to flu symptoms, killed at least 245
people in the Congolese town of Kikwit in 1995.

Only in the final stages, when the virus eats through the victim's
veins and arteries causing massive internal hemorrhaging and blood to
pour out of every orifice -- is it clear that Ebola has struck. The
mortality rate is 90 percent.

The most recent major outbreak of Ebola killed more than 170 people
in Uganda last year.

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