Bukavu (DR Congo) (AFP)

First two people were tested positive for Ebola in South Kivu province, and one of them died, the province's governorate said Friday, the third affected by the epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from Congo for a year.

"Two positive test cases of Ebola have been confirmed on the night of August 15 in South Kivu, in the territory of Mwenga," said the governorate of South Kivu arrived at AFP.

One of the 26-year-old "dead" has passed away and one of her "tested positive" children is still alive and in medical care, the statement said.

"Since yesterday, the teams of the national coordination came to support to effectively contribute to the fight against this disease," the governor of South Kivu Theo Ngwabidje told reporters.

Declared 1 August 2018, the epidemic of haemorrhagic fever, which is transmitted by direct and close human contacts and whose case-fatality rate is very high, has long been confined to rural areas of North Kivu (mainly Beni and Butembo) and in neighboring Ituri. Two cases have nonetheless been recorded in neighboring Uganda.

"Beni, Butembo, Goma was still stagnant, but with the disease in South Kivu, the risk of spreading to Kalemie (Tananyika province), Tanzania and Burundi are enormous," worried a Congolese epidemiologist. university professor.

In early August, a woman close to a gold digger who died a few days earlier in Goma, neighboring North Kivu, was quarantined with fourteen other relatives. The tests performed on these 15 suspected cases were subsequently negative.

The DRC is fighting the tenth Ebola outbreak on its soil since the outbreak of the disease in 1976.

© 2019 AFP