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• Posted December 12, 2024

Mystery Illness Outbreak in Congo May Be Malaria

There's early evidence that a mysterious flu-like illness that has sickened 416 people and left 75 dead in the Democratic Republic of Congo over recent weeks may be malaria.

Laboratory samples taken from infected people are suggestive of malaria, although more research is needed to confirm that, health officials said.

“Of the 12 samples taken, nine were positive for malaria but these samples were not of very good quality, so we are continuing to research to find out if this is an epidemic,” Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director-general of Congo's National Institute for Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, told the Associated Press.

According to the World Health Organization, most of the deaths are occurring in children under the age of 14 living in Congo’s western Kwango province.

Children are the most vulnerable to being killed by the mosquito-borne disease.

"It is very likely that it [the outbreak] is malaria, because most of the victims are children,” Muyembe said.

Symptoms have included fever, headache, cough and anemia.

It's been tough to get a handle on the outbreak, because the area where it's occurring is about 435 miles from Kinshasha, Congo's capital, and it takes at least two days to get there. As well, the nearest testing facility is more than 300 miles away, the AP reported.

As the outbreak began and spread, health experts were concerned that it could be due to a wholly new pathogen.

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.

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

International teams on the ground were also collecting 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.

More information

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more on pandemics.

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