Ebola
DR Congo starts vaccinating against deadly Ebola outbreak
It's the 14th outbreak of the killer virus in the country since 1976, including six since 2018.
Two patients were cured after receiving treatment, including with the REGN-EB3 cocktail of monoclonal antibodies approved by the US Food and Drug Administration at the end of last year.
The global death toll from COVID-19, set to pass five million, is already far worse than most other viral epidemics of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The 79-year-old virologist was speaking at a ceremony in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital Kinshasa marking the arrival on the market of the "Ebanga" treatment, which was approved last December by the US Food and Drug Administration.
Scientists already knew Ebola could lie dormant in survivors, who test negative because the virus is in tissue rather than circulating in the blood.
The 18-year-old had travelled to Abidjan by bus from Labe in northern Guinea, a journey of about 1,500 kilometres (950 miles) that traverses a densely-forested region where Ebola epidemics broke out earlier this year and 2013-16.
The case was recorded in Abidjan, Ivory Coast's economic hub, in an 18-year-old Guinean woman who had arrived in the country on Wednesday after travelling by road from Labe in Guinea, the authorities said on Saturday.
The Institut Pasteur had confirmed the case after testing samples taken from an 18-year-old Guinean woman, Health Minister Pierre N'Gou Demba told RTI state television late on Saturday.
At 16 confirmed cases and seven probable infections according to WHO figures, the limited size of the latest flare-up has been credited to experience from the 2013-16 epidemic, which killed more than 11,300 people mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The UN body said it had delivered around 24,000 vaccine doses to Guinea and that 11,000 people at high risk had received shots, including more than 2,800 frontline workers.
The latest outbreak saw 16 confirmed cases and seven probable infections, the WHO said, adding 12 of these were fatal.
The outbreak, the DRC's 12th since the disease was first identified in 1976, was rolled back thanks to a campaign to vaccinate hundreds of people, the new health minister Jean-Jacques Mbungani said.
The outbreak, declared last weekend, is the first in the region since a 2013-16 epidemic left more than 11,300 people dead, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
One person died Friday and another on Saturday, while the two others died in early February.
The WHO's office in the Democratic Republic of Congo said four people in Biene had been vaccinated and 334 other contacts would also receive the jab.
The cases marked the first known resurgence of Ebola in West Africa since a 2013-2016 epidemic that began in Guinea and killed more than 11,300 people across the region.
Guinea's Health Minister Remy Lamah told AFP on Saturday that four people had died of Ebola, the first deaths since a 2013-2016 epidemic -- which began in Guinea.
Since the West African Ebola crisis of 2013-16 - which left 11,300 dead across the region - the WHO has eyed each new outbreak with great concern, treating the most recent Congolese epidemic as an international health emergency.
The World Health Organization said the latest outbreak had killed 55 people among 119 confirmed and 11 probable cases since it began in June.