Second Person Dies in Latest Ebola Outbreak in DRC

The woman may have had a link to another person, who was married to an Ebola survivor and who died a few days previously in Democratic Republic of Congo.

Written byCatherine Offord

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A second person has died in Democratic Republic of Congo’s 12th recorded outbreak of Ebola, the World Health Organization and the country’s health ministry announced today (February 11). The 60-year-old woman had links to another woman, who was married to a survivor of an earlier outbreak in DRC and who died a few days earlier, according to Reuters.

The cases occurred in the North Kivu province of the country, where a previous outbreak of the disease was declared over by the World Health Organization (WHO) last summer. By then, there had been more than 2,000 deaths since that outbreak’s start in DRC in 2018.

The first person to have died in the latest outbreak was a 42-year-old woman who likely contracted the disease sexually from her husband, according to a WHO official interviewed by The Washington Post. “The evidence has grown over the years that the ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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