Health practitioners in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday concluded vaccination of Ebola patients in the city of Mbandaka with experimental vaccine, as they try to contain a disease that has killed around 25 people, the health ministry said.
Ebola virus disease easily spreads through bodily fluids and the medical strategy involves vaccinating all the people a patient may have infected and then vaccinating all the people a patient may have infected and then vaccinating a second "ring" of contacts around each of those potential sufferers.
The VSV-EBOV vaccine, developed by Merck, has been administered to 1 112 people, including 567 in the northwestern city. That covers all known contacts of confirmed Ebola cases in the city as well as those people's contacts, the ministry said in a statement late on Sunday.
The vaccine was first pushed out in Mbandaka on May 21 and hailed as a paradigm shift in the fight against Ebola by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The WHO last week revealed that it was carefully optimistic about the progress of the response yet Mbandaka's location directly upstream the Congo River of the capital Kinshasa, a city of more than 10 million people, remains a worry.
