In addition to the confirmed case of Ebola virus contamination detected in Côte d'Ivoire, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday that a suspected case and nine contact cases had been identified.

“Regarding the numbers, there are two cases.

One that has been confirmed - a young woman, and there is also a suspected case, ”WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic said at a press briefing in Geneva.

"There are currently nine identified contact cases," he added.

An "extremely worrying" situation

The case of Ebola hemorrhagic fever contamination was detected on Saturday in Abidjan in an 18-year-old Guinean girl, who arrived in Côte d'Ivoire on August 11 from the Guinean city of Labé (north), a journey of more than 1,500 km she did by road. The patient is currently undergoing treatment in a hospital in Abidjan. The WHO considered "extremely worrying" that this case was declared in Abidjan, a metropolis of more than four million inhabitants, two months after the announcement of the end of the epidemic of 2021 in Guinea.

“Regarding the first investigations on the genetic sequence of the Ebola virus which was identified in Abidjan, for the moment we have no indication that this outbreak in Côte d'Ivoire has a link with the Ebola epidemic that raged in Guinea earlier this year, ”Tarik Jasarevic noted.

"We need to do other laboratory investigations to find out if there is a link with any previous epidemic", in particular with the one that hit Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia hard between the end of 2013 and 2016, a- he added.

An Ebola virus subtype?

The spokesperson, however, specified that the first results show "that it is probably the Zaire strain of the virus", namely the subtype of Ebola virus which plagued Guinea this year as well as during the great epidemic in West Africa.

Although Côte d'Ivoire shares borders with Guinea and Liberia, the country had not recorded any confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease since 1994, the year a scientist was infected during an epidemic among chimpanzees, according to the WHO.

The outbreak in Côte d'Ivoire is the third on the African continent this year after those in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea.

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