NewsDesk @bactiman63

Chief medical officer of the Sankuru Provincial Health Division, Aimée Alengo reported the following statistics to local media:

“From the first week to the 34th epidemiological week, the province notified that 1258 cases of Monkeypox including 23 deaths were recorded. The epicenter of this disease are the health zones crossed by the equatorial forest, namely: Bena Dibele, Tumbiloto, Lombela, Katako, Lodja and Bikuku. In these areas, the vital activity is fishing and hunting, the reservoir of this disease is the corpses of monkey stables found in the forest and consumed by the population“.

In addition, Aimée Alengo indicates that at the current stage there is no support from the government or from partners in the management of cases of this disease in the region.

“In the past we had a whole program supported by USAID where they were also taking charge of the cases. Now we take care of the cases with the means on board, for the moment we have neither the intervention of the government nor of the partners”, he lamented.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is facing the worrying development of the monkey pox epidemic. It was the first country to have discovered a human case of this disease in 1970. The country intends to strengthen surveillance of this viral zoonosis to control it or even significantly reduce the number of cases.

According to the World Health Organization, From 1 January – 14 August 2022, the Democratic Republic of the Congo reported 2,877 suspected including 195 confirmed cases from 134 health zones across 22 provinces, with Sankuru being the most affected province.

Monkeypox/CDC