Ebola vaccine
Up to 12 infected in Congo's new Ebola outbreak - WHO
There have now been nine confirmed cases and three probable cases of the disease in and around Mbandaka, the WHO said. Six of those people have died, it added.
The new J&J vaccine had initially been rejected by DRC's former health minister Oly Ilunga, who cited the risks of introducing a new product in communities where mistrust of Ebola responders is already high.
The announcement comes hot on the heels of a decision last Monday by the European Commission to allow the release to market of an injectable vaccine.
Figures released by the government’s Ebola committee showed that 204,044 people had been inoculated since 8 August.
The fight against Ebola has advanced more in recent years than in any since it was discovered near Congo’s eponymous river in 1976.
More than 3,000 doses remain in stock in the capital Kinshasa, allowing authorities to quickly deploy it to the affected areas near the Ugandan border.
The VSV-EBOV vaccine has been administered to 1,112 people, including 567 in the northwestern city.
The current Ebola outbreak in the DRC has already taken the lives of 25 people. But this time we have a new weapon – a vaccine.
To be prepared for Ebola, we need to discover how the virus moves through the wild and the city alike.
Having this vaccine means the world is better placed now than it was in 2014-2016, when the hemorrhagic fever killed more than 11,300 people in history’s worst Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The vaccine, known as rVSV-ZEBOV and developed by Merck, is not yet licensed but was shown to be highly protective against Ebola in clinical trials published last December.
Democratic Republic of Congo's health ministry has approved the use of a new Ebola vaccine.
The vaccine requires one dose to prime the immune system and a second shot to boost the body's response.
There are now calls to lift any travel bans & trade restrictions affecting Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The latest case was detected in Macenta prefecture, about 200 kilometres from the village of Korokpara.
Four people were tested and two of them were found to have Ebola.
Two Liberian Red Cross officials were suspended in November, accused of misusing $1.8 million in donor funds.
The new patient is a relative who had helped care for the earlier victim, Mariatu Jalloh.
The country was declared free of the virus late last year, and the region as a whole cleared yesterday.