Goma (DR Congo) (AFP)
Congolese health authorities announced Saturday that they have received 11,000 doses of the second Ebola vaccine (EVD), which has been raging in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for more than a year.
The provincial health minister of North Kivu "received Friday 11,000 doses out of the 50,000 planned for the first batch of the second Ebola vaccine, Johnson & Johnson," says the DRC Ministry of Health in its bulletin on the situation of the epidemic published Saturday.
This vaccine comes from Belgium and will be used in addition to the 1st Ebola vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV-GF, manufactured by the US Merck Sharpe and Dohme (MSD) laboratory that uses the belt strategy in EVD infected areas. .
The new vaccine will target populations in areas uninfected by the 10th Ebola outbreak, say the authorities.
Friday, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, chief of experts in charge of the fight against Ebola in the DRC, said that the second vaccine will be used in mid-November and that "the operation will be launched simultaneously in the DRC and Rwanda".
Declared 1 August 2018, the current Ebola epidemic is the tenth on Congolese soil since the onset of the disease in 1976.
It affects the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri and has made 2,183 deaths out of 3,272 cases, according to the latest official figures.
Since vaccination began on August 8, 2018, 245,999 people have been vaccinated.
© 2019 AFP