A doctor who recently returned to France from a humanitarian mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has tested positive for Ebola, marking the European country's first confirmed case linked to the current outbreak, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday.
The patient has been placed in isolation and health authorities are tracing contacts, the ministry said in a statement. It added that the risk to the wider European population was low.
The DRC's Ebola outbreak is linked to the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus, which has no approved vaccines or treatments. It has infected more than 1,000 people and killed 267 – generating the largest number of confirmed cases within the first month of any episode of the disease, the World Health Organisation said this week.
Experts say the disease was probably circulating for months before the outbreak was officially declared on May 15. Early cases were identified in urban areas, and infections have since been reported in at least three densely populated displacement camps.
The two largest previous Ebola outbreaks occurred in West Africa – in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia between 2014 and 2016 – and in the DRC in 2018.
A US citizen treated for Ebola in Germany was discharged earlier this month after no virus had been detected in the patient since May 30.
Experimental treatment
The US has provided doses of an experimental antibody drug developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical for use in clinical tests to fight the outbreak in the DRC, a Health Department representative said, a shift from its former position that the drug should be available only to Americans.
The representative said that the drug is being made available for compassionate use in the DRC as well as to advance a clinical test in the outbreak region.
Mapp's MBP134 will be tested on its own as a treatment for Bundibugyo and alongside Gilead's antiviral remdesivir, also known as Veklury, which was widely used during the Covid-19 pandemic, the WHO told Reuters.
The Mapp test is sponsored by the WHO and led by the University of Oxford in the UK, alongside the DRC and Ugandan governments.
Doses of the Mapp drug and other therapeutics intended for tests are being shipped now, the WHO said on Monday. The agency is working with health partners to prepare to enrol clinics in the tests.
Another Gilead antiviral, obeldesivir, will be tested as a potential preventive option, probably starting this month, the WHO and scientists have said. This test will be led by the DRC, Uganda and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and co-sponsored by the DRC's National Institute for Biomedical Research and France's ANRS Emerging Infectious Diseases agency.
