Health Officials Race to Prevent Congo Yellow Fever Disaster
DAKAR, (Reuters) – It is the stuff of a disaster movie: an outbreak of yellow fever in Congo’s capital city, full of unvaccinated people mostly huddled together in slums with too few drains and the kind of sticky, fetid climate that mosquitoes love.
Kinshasa’s 12 million people – twice as many as there are doses of yellow fever vaccine anywhere in the world – are largely unprotected against this sometimes deadly but easily preventable illness, which has killed at least 353 in Democratic Republic of Congo and neighbour Angola.
And though the mosquito-borne virus has yet to gain momentum in Africa’s third largest metropolis, officials in Congo’s government and the World Health Organisation (WHO) are racing to avoid a repeat of the kind of urban epidemics that decimated Western cities like New York and Philadelphia in centuries past.
