• Posted December 5, 2024

Mystery Illness Kills Dozens in Congo

Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo are racing to try to identify the cause of a mysterious, flu-like illness that has sickened 376 people and left 79 dead in that country.

In a alert posted on the social media platform X on Tuesday, the Congo's Ministry of Public Health, Hygiene and Social Security said the origin of the disease, first detected in Kwango province in southwestern Congo, remains unknown.

Symptoms reported by infected people include fever, headache, nasal congestion, cough, difficulty breathing and anemia, the notice added.

Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Medicine, told NBC News that the Congo outbreak “does raise alarm bells” because of its location. Humans and wildlife interact to a high degree in that country, and that could raise the risk of a pathogen moving from animals to humans, he explained.

“Many animal infections that transmit from animal to human can cause pretty severe disease,” Karan added.

To try to pinpoint what pathogen is causing the illnesses, local health officials will start screening for common infections like flu or malaria, before testing for less common germs, he explained. If those tests are negative, officials may genetically sequence tissue, blood, mucus or bone marrow from infected people. 

But Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who has worked in Congo since 2002, said such efforts may be complicated by a weak health care infrastructure and underlying health issues in some Congo residents, including malaria and malnutrition.

“I think it’s really important to be aware of what’s happening, and I think it’s also really important not to panic until we have more information,” she told NBC News.

“It could be anything," she added. "It could be influenza, it could be Ebola, it could be Marburg, it could be meningitis, it could be measles. At this point, we really just don’t know.”

Other health authorities have said they are working with Congo officials to try to identify the disease causing the outbreak.

World Health Organization spokesperson Tarik Jašarević told NBC News that “we have dispatched a team to the remote area to collect samples for lab investigations."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has an office in Congo, told NBC News that it is providing technical assistance to a rapid response team dispatched by a local emergency operations center.

International teams on the ground will also collect information about what risk factors sick people have had in common and who they’ve been in contact with, Amira Albert Roess, a professor of global health and epidemiology at George Mason University in Virginia, told NBC News.

“I think pretty quickly we’ll start to have an answer as to what this is,” Roess said, noting there have been “a lot of deaths, especially in such a short amount of time, with the same types of symptoms.”

More information

The National Institutes of Health has more on pandemics.

SOURCE: Congo Ministry of Public Health, Hygiene and Social Security, statement, Dec. 4, 2024; NBC News