Day: February 26, 2025

KINSHASA, CONGO — Unidentified illnesses in northwestern Congo have killed more than 50 people over the past five weeks, nearly half of them within hours after they felt sick. 

The outbreaks in two distant villages in Congo’s Equateur province began on Jan. 21 and include 419 cases and 53 deaths. Health officials still do not know the cause, or whether the cases in the two villages, which are separated by more than 190 kilometers (118 miles), are related. It’s also unclear how the diseases are spreading, including whether they are spreading between people. 

The first victims in one of the villages were children who ate a bat and died within 48 hours, the Africa office of the World Health Organization said this week. More infections were found in the other village, where at least some of the patients have malaria. 

Outbreaks in two remote villages 

Illnesses have been clustered in two remote villages in different health zones of Equateur province, which is 640 kilometers (398 miles) from Kinshasa. 

The first outbreak began in the village of Boloko after three children ate a bat and died within 48 hours. More than two weeks later a second and larger outbreak was recorded in the village of Bomate, where more than 400 people have been sickened. According to WHO’s Africa office, no links have been established between the cases in the two villages. 

Dr. Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital, a regional monitoring center, and one of the government experts deployed to respond to the outbreak, says the situations in the two villages are somewhat different. 

“The first one with a lot of deaths, that we continue to investigate because it’s an unusual situation, (and) in the second episode that we’re dealing with, we see a lot of the cases of malaria,” said Ngalebato. 

The WHO Africa office said the quick progression from sickness to death in Boloko is a key concern, along with the high number of deaths in Bomate.

What are the symptoms? 

Congo’s Ministry of Health said about 80% of the patients share similar symptoms including fever, chills, body aches and diarrhea. 

While these symptoms can be caused by many common infections, health officials initially feared the symptoms and the quick deaths of some of the victims could also be a sign of a hemorrhagic fever such as Ebola, which was also linked to an infected animal. 

However, Ebola and similar diseases including Marburg have been ruled out after more than a dozen samples were collected and tested in the capital of Kinshasa. 

The WHO said it is investigating a number of possible causes, including malaria, viral hemorrhagic fever, food or water poisoning, typhoid fever and meningitis. 

What is being done in response? 

Congo’s government says experts have been sent to the villages since Feb. 14, mainly to help investigate the cases and slow the spread. 

Ngalebato said patients have been responding to treatments that target the different symptoms. 

The remote location of the villages has hindered access to patients while the weak health care infrastructure has made it difficult to carry out surveillance and manage patients. Such challenges are common in disease outbreaks in Congo. In December, an unknown illness killed dozens. 

In the latest outbreaks, several victims died before experts could even reach them, Ngalebato said. 

There needs to be urgent action “to accelerate laboratory investigations, improve case management and isolation capacities, and strengthen surveillance and risk communication,” the WHO Africa office has said. 

The United States has been the largest bilateral donor to Congo’s health sector and supported the training of hundreds of field epidemiologists to help detect and control diseases across the vast country. The outbreaks were detected as the Trump administration put a freeze on foreign aid during a 90-day review. 

Is there a link to Congo’s forests? 

There have long been concerns about diseases jumping from animals to humans in places where people regularly eat wild animals. The number of such outbreaks in Africa has surged by more than 60% in the last decade, the WHO said in 2022. 

Experts say this might be what is happening in Congo, which is home to about 60% of the forests in the Congo Basin, home to the largest expanse of tropical forest on Earth. 

“All these viruses are viruses that have reservoirs in the forest. And so, as long as we have these forests, we will always have a few epidemics with viruses which will mutate,” said Gabriel Nsakala, a professor of public health at Congo’s National Pedagogical University, who previously worked at the Congolese health ministry on Ebola and coronavirus response programs.
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LUBBOCK, TEXAS — A person who was hospitalized with measles has died from measles in West Texas, the first death in an outbreak that began late last month.  

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center spokesperson Melissa Whitfield confirmed the death Wednesday. 

It wasn’t clear the age of the patient, who died overnight. Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The measles outbreak in rural West Texas has grown to 124 cases across nine counties, the state health department said Tuesday.  

There are also nine cases in eastern New Mexico. Measles is a respiratory virus that can survive in the air for up to two hours.  

Up to 9 out of 10 people who are susceptible will get the virus if exposed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most kids will recover from the measles if they get it, but infection can lead to dangerous complications like pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling and death.  

The outbreak is largely spreading in the Mennonite community in an area where small towns are separated by vast stretches of oil rig-dotted open land but connected due to people traveling between towns for work, church, grocery shopping and other day-to-day errands.
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. will invest up to $1 billion to combat the spread of bird flu, including increasing imports of eggs, agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said on Wednesday.  

A three-year bird flu outbreak in U.S. poultry has killed 166 million chickens since 2022, according to USDA data.  

The virus has also infected nearly 1,000 dairy herds and almost 70 people, including one death, since early 2024. 

The USDA will spend up to $500 million to provide free biosecurity audits to farms and $400 million to increase payment rates to farmers who need to kill their chickens due to bird flu, Rollins said at a conference of state agriculture officials.  

Some of the money will come from cuts to USDA spending by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Rollins said in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed. 

The USDA is exploring vaccines for chickens but is not yet authorizing their use, Rollins said. The poultry industry is divided on whether to vaccinate chickens because of potential trade implications.  

The administration plans to increase imports and decrease exports of eggs to boost domestic supply and combat record high egg prices, Rollins said. Turkey has said it will export 15,000 tons of eggs to the U.S. through July. 

In May, the administration of former president Joe Biden allocated more than $800 million to combat bird flu in livestock. About $450 million of that money is still available, a USDA official said on Tuesday at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture conference.  
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Earth is not in danger of being hit by an asteroid in the near future, NASA and the European Space Agency said Tuesday.

The proclamations from the two agencies came after an asteroid dubbed 2024 YR4, discovered in December, had scientists speculating that it could strike Earth in December 2032.

Scientists now project the asteroid will simply fly past our planet. That’s a good thing, because an asteroid that big, measuring 40 to 90 meters across, could cause a lot of damage.

After two months of observation, scientists have significantly reduced the odds of the asteroid hitting Earth. At one point the likelihood of a strike was as high as 3%. ESA has reduced the odds to 0.001%, while NASA has reduced its odds to 0.0027%.

“That’s the outcome we expected all along, although we couldn’t be 100% sure that it would happen,” said Paul Chodas, who heads up NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.

The odds changed because the world’s telescopes were able to track the asteroid, narrowing where a strike could occur and increasingly ruling out the odds of a direct hit. The asteroid is moving away from Earth and is expected to disappear from view in one or two months.

“While this asteroid no longer poses a significant impact hazard to Earth, 2024 YR4 provided an invaluable opportunity” for study, NASA said in a statement.

NASA cautioned, however, that there is a small chance the asteroid could hit the moon in 2032. The probability, according to NASA, of that happening currently stands at 1.7%. NASA’s Chodas thinks those odds will likely dwindle, too.
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