Congo virus outbreak under control - WHO official

An outbreak of the deadly Congo virus reported from outlying rural areas in the south-western province of Baluchistan, which has already caused three deaths and forced four others to remain under treatment in quarantined locations, is now under control, according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) official. "It is now under control, no new cases have emerged and, most importantly, in the context of this focal outbreak, no other case from that particular family has come up yet. That's good news," Dr. Faizullah Kakar, an acting WHO spokesman for the agency's operations in Pakistan, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad. A senior Baluchistan health ministry official told IRIN on Monday that three people had died and four others had been hospitalised after being diagnosed with Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever - the latest cases in a sequence that harks back to the year 2001 and which has yielded 231 cases in Pakistan's largest and most underdeveloped province since then. Kakar said that the four people who had been quarantined were still being treated, but were "doing okay now". "WHO is in touch with the situation on a daily basis, through our office in Quetta that is monitoring events. We have written to the government, giving our recommendations on how to control the outbreak," he added. The disease, which can be caused by a tick bite or contact with an infected animal, can sometimes cause patients literally to bleed to death after the blood is unable to clot properly. There is no known vaccine against the drug, although infected people can benefit from treatment with special anti-viral drugs. Even so, roughly 30 percent of affected people can die even after receiving treatment. "The important thing is that when there is a case, you immediately identify all the contacts [that the patient might have been associated with]. Because it's a deadly disease, if you don't follow someone closely, you lose the critical time, it becomes too late, you lose the patient," Kakar stressed. The WHO official said that the government and UN agencies need to take a number of steps in order to counter the spread of the disease. "We have already made those recommendations: that is to tell people what to do when there is a case, they should limit access to the patient, etc," he explained. But, despite its underdeveloped status and a sparse, mainly rural population, the people of Baluchistan were quite aware of both the illness and its ramifications, Kakar said. "We just conducted a study in Baluchistan that we are analysing. Any time we asked people about Congo fever, they said they knew about it and would try to act to prevent its spread," he noted. WHO had also conducted workshops and educated doctors about the measures needed to treat and control the spread of the disease, Kakar explained. "Incidents amongst health workers have gone down since we held the workshop," he added.