Ebola Spreads Concurrent With Measles Outbreak

The Daily Mail reports:

      Ebola has spread to the Congolese city of Goma, which has a population of more than a million people, as the virus continues to devastate the region.  

      The victim is a pastor who had arrived in the city by bus after visiting Butembo, a town around 200miles (320km) north in the centre of the outbreak.

      He had been preaching at a church where he would have touched worshippers 'including the sick', the country's health ministry said on Sunday. 

      Authorities have urged people to remain calm after the government said the chances of the virus spreading were 'low'.

      But tensions are high and two health workers were murdered in their homes over the weekend.

Meanwhile, the same areas experiencing the Ebola outbreak has been hit with a measles outbreak which has actually proven to be deadlier, killing almost 2,000 (the official death toll for the Ebola outbreak is just over 1,500, although the actual total is probably much higher). The reader that sent me the Zero Hedge article wondered whether this concurrent outbreak raises the specter of genetic mixing between the two viruses, and, later, I saw that Anonymous Conservative had raised the same point. I'm not a biologist, but both Ebola and measles are RNA viruses which have the potential to mutate more easily than DNA based viruses.

     Update: "Vaccinations against Ebola begin in DR Congo city of Goma"--Al Jazeera.

      Vaccinations against Ebola have begun in Goma, eastern DRC, after the first case of the virus was identified in the major city.

     The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was hit with its second-worst Ebola outbreak last year, but this is the first time Goma - with a population of about one million - has had a confirmed case.

      "Vaccination against Ebola just started to protect people who have come to be in contact with the positive case," the World Health Organization (WHO) said. 

      According to  Dr Harouna Djingarey, infectious disease programme manager for the WHO's regional office in the eastern DRC, the vaccination campaign, which began Monday, is a crucial task to contain the spread in Goma. 

      "It's the door of this region to the rest of the world," Djingarey said. 

      "From here, you can fly to go to everywhere in the world. If we don't have the control over the contacts, some high-risk contacts may fly, take a plane and go somewhere."