Congo | Common News Update

Feb222021 by adminNo Comments

Italian ambassador to DR Congo killed after convoy attacked during ‘kidnap attempt’

World

Italy's ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo has been killed in an ambush, the United Nations has said. Luca Attanasio, 43, who was married with three young daughters, was in a convoy on his way from the eastern regional capital Goma to see a feeding programme in Rutshuru, close to the borders with Rwanda and Uganda. An Italian military policeman, Vittorio Iacovacci, 30, and an unnamed Congolese driver who was working for the UN's World Food Programme also died, the government in Rome said. Image: The vehicle in which the Italian ambassador was travelling. Pic: AP Italy's foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, said the circumstances of the "brutal attack" were still unclear and "no effort will be spared to shed light on what happe...

Feb122021 by adminNo Comments

Second Ebola death in one week reported in Democratic Republic of Congo

World

Feb. 11 (UPI) -- A second Ebola death in the Democratic Republic of Congo was reported Thursday amid a resurgence of the disease. A 60-year-old woman from the Biena health zone, the same area where the first death was reported, became the second person to die of the disease within a week months after the last major outbreak was declared over. Advertisement "It is unfortunate that both cases in the recent outbreak have been discovered after the people have died. What this means is that we are not clear about the magnitude of what we could be dealing with," said Anne-Marie Connor, World Vision's national director to the DRC. The first death was reported on Sunday after the National Institute of Biomedical Research had tested samples taken from a 42-year-old woman who exhibited Ebola-like sy...

Feb82021 by adminNo Comments

Democratic Republic of Congo confirms new Ebola infection

World

Feb. 8 (UPI) -- A new case of the Ebola virus has been detected in the Democratic Republic of Congo some eight months after its last outbreak of the disease was declared over. The World Health Organization said in a statement Sunday that the African nation's ministry of health had diagnosed the deadly disease in Butembo city in North Kivu province where the virus had killed 2,299 people over the last two years ending in June. Advertisement The Butembo branch of the National Institute of Biomedical Research had tested samples taken from a woman who exhibited Ebola-like symptoms after she had sought medical attention and her results came back positive for the disease, which she later died from, the U.N. health body said. The healthy ministry said Sunday the woman died Wednesday and had been...

Jun252020 by adminNo Comments

WHO: Ebola outbreak that killed more than 2,000 in Congo is over

World

June 25 (UPI) -- The World Health Organization said Thursday that the Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, which killed 2,280 people over nearly two years, has ended. The Ebola outbreak hit the eastern DRC on Aug. 1, 2018, in North Kivu province, nearly a week after the World Health Organization declared the ninth Ebola outbreak over in the DRC's northwest region. That outbreak, in the Equateur province, 1,500 miles away, infected 50 people and killed 33. Advertisement The 10th Ebola outbreak since 1976 for the central African country ranked second deadliest worldwide only to the 2014-2016 outbreak in an active conflict zone in West Africa. The 2014-2016 outbreak killed 2,287 people and infected 3,470 people, 28 percent of whom were children, according to the U....

Nov282019 by adminNo Comments

UN says armed attacks in eastern Congo kill Ebola responders

Health

Rebels killed four Ebola response workers in an overnight ambush in eastern Congo, the World Health Organization said Thursday, warning that the attack will give the waning outbreak new momentum in what has been called a war zone. “We are heartbroken that our worst fears have been realized,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. It was by far the deadliest such attack in the second-worst Ebola outbreak in history, the United Nations health agency said. The dead included a member of a vaccination team, two drivers and a police officer. Many of the six others wounded were with Congo’s health ministry. Mai-Mai fighters attacked a camp housing scores of aid workers overnight in Biakato, local official Salambongo Selemani told The Associated Press. Warnings had been posted demanding that ...