Health officials get ready for vaccination campaign against yellow fever
Officials from the government of Congo and the World Health Organization (WHO) are racing to fight the outbreak of yellow fever in the country’s capital city.
The deadly but preventable illness has already at least 353 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and its neighbor Angola. Now, it is threatening to spread across Kinshasa’s mostly unvaccinated population of 12 million, which is a number twice as many as there are doses of yellow fever vaccine anywhere in the world.
With three weeks to go before they start a vaccination campaign for 11.6 million people against the hemorrhagic virus in three Congolese provinces, and only 1.3 million doses of the vaccine on their way to Congo, time is not on their side.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) head of operations Bart Janssens said that the epidemic has become something that can exponentially reinforce itself and it is not easy to reverse. He also said that the disease has a significant risk of becoming a big epidemic and that is what would like to avoid at all costs.
There are currently just six million doses of vaccine in the world, and the method of making more, using chicken eggs, takes about a year. As an emergency measure, health officials have decided to split the doses into fifths, enabling them to cover more people, although only for a year rather than a lifetime.
Congo’s health minister Felix Kabange told a news agency that if they administer the full dose of the vaccine, the time needed to manufacture all those vaccines would risk allowing the epidemic to embrace the whole country.
Yellow fever was once a big killer in the West, wiping out about a tenth of the population of New York and Philadelphia in the 18th century. Then, 80 years ago, a vaccine was created and the virus was quickly eradicated in the rich world.
In Africa it mainly persists in remote rural areas, and not since the 1970s has it threatened a major city.
The current outbreak, with 3,464 suspected cases so far, about a third of them in Congo, began in Angola in December. Hitching a ride on popular trade routes from the capital Luanda, it jumped the border into Congo, then to its megacity capital.
A small but significant fraction of those who catch the disease die from jaundice, bleeding and multiple organ failure.
Unlike the Ebola virus, which has killed 11,300 people in West Africa since 2013, yellow fever initially spreads slowly, as the mosquitoes carrying it don’t travel more than 100 meters from where they are born, health officials said. That may give some breathing space for the response.
Yet the bigger risk with a city, he said, is that the mosquitoes themselves start passing the virus on to their own larvae, enabling them to become a reservoir for the disease.And, as with Ebola, a worry is that aeroplanes can carry the virus to other more distant cities.
Asia has never had yellow fever, despite being home to the mosquitoes that spread it. But this year 11 Chinese expatriates working in Angola contracted it and brought it back to China.
Even with dose fracturing and a faster mobilization, the campaign in Congo is expected to continue well into next year, said Eugene Kabambi, WHO spokesman for Congo.
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