Unknown illness in the DRC
Since sometime before 24 October an unknown illness in the Kwango province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has sickened at least 394 people and killed 30 (WHO) or 79 (DRC Ministry for Health) or 143 (Reuters and AP) people. Symptoms seem to be those of a respiratory disease: fever, headaches, runny nose, coughing, difficulty breathing and anaemia. I say seems to be because no one has yet identified the cause.
It would be easy to assume an infectious agent is responsible for the deaths—but it could be something else. For example, there was a case, again in Africa. in which many children died unexpectedly after becoming infected with some pathogen—but it wasn’t the virus that killed them, it was the cough syrup they were given to help with the symptoms. Is that what’s happening here? I have no idea—I’m just saying, keep an open mind.
It would also be easy to assume that this is a scarily virulent, highly pathogenic disease: all those people dead and so quickly. But it’s the nature of diseases to not really be noticed until some people start to die—which means thousands of people could have had mild illnesses and recovered, or have been (still are?) asymptomatically infected, but no one paid attention until young people started to die. According to a WHO spokesperson, “The cases began in mid-October and the signal was picked up on 29 November by the Ministry of Health. Among the cases reported as of 3 December, 63 percent are children under the age of 15, who also account for 81 percent of reported deaths. Among these, young children under the age of five years are particularly affected.”
Young people dying is, of course tragic, but it also introduces another uncertainty factor. Does this mean it’s something to do with those younger people never having been exposed to a similar pathogen (if it is a pathogen) before and so having no immunity, whereas older people have? Or might it mean something in the young people’s environment—toxins in school water supply? scratches from a poisonous plant as they play outside in bare feet?1—could be wholly or partly responsible? No one has any idea. Yet.
So I’m finding all this very interesting and will be following along. So if you’re also interested and are okay with summaries from an absolutely unqualified in any biomedical sense observer, feel free to follow along, too. But if you really want expert, informed opinions you should sign up for reports from WHO, CDC, CIDRAP, or the Johns Hopkins health security newsletter.
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