A massive vaccination campaign is about to begin in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an international children’s charity warned, on Tuesday, that an outbreak of yellow fever, which has killed hundreds of people in central Africa, could spread across the globe. The epidemic, which has killed over 300 people in Angola since last December, has now spread to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that a total of 2,269 suspected cases and 16 deaths have been reported in the DRC as of the 8th of August. “It has got us incredibly worried,” said Ruairidh Villar of Save the Children, which is helping with the vaccination efforts. “We’ve just scrambled an emergency team to the DRC to support a last-ditch vaccination campaign before the outbreak reaches Kinshasa. Our fear is it is likely to go global if we can’t stop it soon and it hits the city.”
Yellow fever, like the Zika virus, is transmitted through the bite of an Aedes Aegypti mosquito. The lethal disease kills half of all those that develop severe symptoms and, fortunately, can be prevented by a vaccination that protects the individual for life. However, very few adults have been immunised in Angola, where the outbreak originated and in the DRC, where it spread.
A last-minute vaccination campaign is now underway to prevent yellow fever from spreading through Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, and potentially developing into a global epidemic. It is to be launched using vaccines containing a fifth of the normal dose because the global stockpile is very low and cannot be produced expediently. Save the Children said there are only 7 million emergency vaccines after stocks were depleted in a series of outbreaks earlier this year.The vaccines take a year to make so it will take a lot of time to produce in large quantities.
The fear is that if the disease takes hold in Kinshasa, a densely packed city with over 10 million people, the infection will spread quickly and infected mosquitos could travel beyond the central African region. Fervent efforts are being made to contain the outbreak before the rainy season begins in September, when mosquitos are most active. The WHO aims to vaccinate 8.5 million people in the DRC capital, Kinshasa, and 3.4 million in the DRC’s border areas before the onset of the rainy season, to reduce the risk of mosquito-borne diseases spreading. The WHO is coordinating with 56 global partners to vaccinate more than 14 million people against yellow fever in more than 8,000 locations, in what is set to be one of the largest vaccination campaigns ever.
The first cases of yellow fever were reported in December 2015 and confirmed in January this year. The first round of vaccinations started a few weeks afterwards. Almost 19m doses of vaccine have been administered since January, but the response was insufficient in curbing the spread of the disease. It may not be as fatal as Ebola but its consequences can be dire. The symptoms include fever, headache, jaundice, muscle pain, nausea, vomiting and fatigue. Some people recover within a few days but a minority become severely ill, suffering organ failure, bleeding from the eyes and death.
