Two Ebola patients who fled a hospital in the DR Congo went to a prayer meeting with 50 other people, potentially exposing them all the deadly virus, a senior aid worker said on Thursday.
Both patients were vomiting and infectious, and died after the prayer session in the city Mbandaka, Dr. Jean-Clement Cabrol, emergency medical coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), said.
The DR Congo has been rattled by an outbreak of the kilelr disease which spread through contact with infected bodily fluids.
The two patients escaped from an isolation ward at the hospital on Monday night.
“The escape was organized by the families, with six motorcycles as the patients were very ill and couldn’t walk,” Cabrol told a news briefing in Geneva on return from the affected region.
“They were taken to a prayer room with 50 people to pray. They were found at two in the morning, one of them dead and one was dying. So that’s 50-60 contacts right there. The patients were in the active phase of the disease, vomiting.”
The rare disease causes fever, vomiting and diarrhea. On average it kills one in two infected people but early detection and rehydration improves chances of survival.
It is the Congo’s ninth outbreak since the disease emerged in 1976 and follows a massive outbreak that spun out of control in West Africa form 2014-2016, when more than 11,300 people died in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Health workers this week began a campaign with an experimental vaccine to protect medical staff.
