A mystery disease has killed 50 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) just hours after symptoms began.
The World Health Organization and doctors in the DRC said this week that the time between symptom onset and death was just 48 hours in most cases.
‘That’s what’s really worrying,’ Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital in the DRC, told the Associated Press.
Officials believe the outbreak began on January 21, and 419 cases have been recorded as of Monday. This includes 53 deaths.
According to the WHO’s Africa office, the first outbreak started in the town of Boloko after three children ate a bat.
They died 48 hours after developing symptoms of hemorrhagic fever, a group of illnesses characterized by fever, bleeding, headache, joint pain, and other symptoms.
Ebola is one of the most infamous causes of hemorrhagic fever.
WHO officials also warned that the number of outbreaks from diseases jumping from animals to humans – such as by eating them – has surged more than 60 percent in Africa in the last decade.
The World Health Organization warned this week that a mystery illness has killed 50 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) within hours of symptom onset. Pictured are Congolese officials and the World Health Organization officials during a training against the Ebola virus in 2018
Officials did not speculate what the mystery illness may be.
However, after the second outbreak of the mystery disease began in the town of Bomate on February 9, officials sent samples from 13 cases for testing.
All samples have been negative for Ebola and other hemorrhagic diseases like Marburg, though some samples were positive for malaria.
The outbreaks come just months after mystery ‘Disease X’ ravaged the DRC and killed 143 people last year. Officials later found it was likely a severe respiratory form of malaria.
The CDC told DailyMail.com at the time that international risk of the disease was ‘low.’
Malaria is extremely prevalent in the DRC, affecting 30million residents and killing nearly 25,000 in 2022, according to charity Severe Malaria Observatory.
That year, the DRC recorded the second-most malaria cases in the world behind Nigeria.
The nation has also grappled with an outbreak of Mpox. The WHO estimates there have been more than 47,000 suspected cases and over 1,000 suspected deaths so far.
