A measles epidemic has been declared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country already struggling to contain the world's second-largest and second-deadliest Ebola outbreak.
A measles epidemic has been declared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country struggling to contain the world's second-largest and second-deadliest Ebola outbreak.
"Since the beginning of 2019, we have seen an increase in the number of suspected cases of measles," the Congolese health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga, said in a statement Monday night, officially declaring the epidemic."This situation is all the more worrying because it represents an increase of more than 700 percent, compared to the epidemiological situation for the same period in 2018.
Yet, the health minister said"enormous challenges remain" in some provinces where children have difficulty attaining immunization services due to insecurity in the region, inaccessibility to vaccination sites, high population movement and vaccine resistance.More than 2.2 million children between the ages of 6 to 59 months were vaccinated against measles over a period of four days in April, and another mass vaccination campaign targeting over 1.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is roughly the size of continental Western Europe and has a population of 81 million, is also grappling with a growing Ebola outbreak. The current outbreak has a case fatality rate of about 67 percent. There have been 1,390 deaths so far, including 1,296 people who died from confirmed cases of Ebola. The other deaths are from probable cases, according to the Congolese health ministry.
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