Second Ebola case in Congo’s Goma infected several people: government

GOMA, Congo (Reuters) – The second case of Ebola recorded in east Congo’s main city of Goma had a large family including 10 children and managed to infect several people before dying of the hemorrhagic fever, the government’s Ebola response coordinator said on Friday.

Coordinator Jean-Jacques Muyembe also said a sister of the man, a gold miner, who had traveled to Congo’s south Kivu was swiftly identified and brought back to Goma.

But he warned that authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo were only identifying an estimated 50 percent of Ebola cases.

“If we continue on that basis, this epidemic could last two or three years,” he told a news conference in Goma.

However, in Geneva World Health Organisation (WHO) spokeswoman Margaret Harris said 538 primary and secondary contacts had so far been traced of all four Ebola patients in Goma.

A spokesman for Congo’s Ebola response team said of the 300 primary and secondary contacts so far identified of the gold miner, 240 had so far been vaccinated.