Ngoy Nsenga, a leading expert at the World Health Organization's (WHO) Ebola response team, told Sputnik that Ebola, being a water-borne disease, would likely re-emerge in different regions across Africa in the future, thus making broader vaccination important to prevent new outbreaks
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th June, 2020) Ngoy Nsenga, a leading expert at the World Health Organization's (WHO) Ebola response team, told Sputnik that Ebola, being a water-borne disease, would likely re-emerge in different regions across Africa in the future, thus making broader vaccination important to prevent new outbreaks.
"Ebola will appear again somewhere, but we need to be ready to circumvent that outbreak and avoid that it expands to the magnitude of the outbreaks that we had in the past. ... We'll have this kind of cases popping up from time to time. The big deal is how do we prevent it, even if we have few cases, from expanding and having a huge outbreak that expands even beyond the border of the [Democratic Republic of the Congo] DRC," Nsenga warned.
The expert added that vaccination would be a key solution to the health crisis.
"Vaccination will definitely be a way to go, but at this point, I don't think this vaccine is given outside of the outbreak, it's only provided to people who had contact [with infected people] when the outbreak occurs," Nsenga noted.
DRC Health Minister Eteni Longondo said on June 1 that a new Ebola outbreak had been reported in the city of Mbandaka, located in the country's northwest. The epidemic began in August 2018 and has claimed over 2,200 lives.
