Kinshasa (Congo): Rwanda closed its border with Congo over the deadly Ebola outbreak on Thursday, while a Congolese official said a person who had contact with the second confirmed Ebola case in the border city of Goma was receiving treatment after showing signs of the disease.
The Ebola coordinator for North Kivu province, Dr Aruna Abedi, told The Associated Press that the person in treatment is a suspected case.
It was not immediately clear whether the person is a family member of the man who died on Wednesday. He had spent several days at home with his family while showing symptoms.
If this suspected case is confirmed, it could be the first transmission of Ebola in this outbreak inside Goma, a city of more than 2 million people on the Rwandan border. The developments came as the outbreak that has killed more than 1,800 people entered its second year.
It is now the second-deadliest Ebola outbreak in history and last month the World Health Organization declared it a rare global emergency.
WHO has recommended against travel restrictions amid the outbreak but says the risk of regional spread is "very high."
Rwanda's state minister for foreign affairs Olivier Nduhungirehe confirmed the border closure to The Associated Press on Thursday, a day after WHO officials had praised African nations for keeping their borders open.
Last week Saudi Arabia stopped issuing visas to people from Congo while citing the Ebola outbreak, shortly before the annual hajj pilgrimage there this month.
Meanwhile, A total of 1,803 lives have been lost in the second worst outbreak of Ebola on record, according to figures released Wednesday.
The Democratic Republic of Congo's pointman on the crisis, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, said a second person had died of Ebola in Goma, a densely-populated city on the border with Rwanda that has transport links to many parts of East Africa.
"A patient who was confirmed with Ebola in Goma has died. Every measure has been taken to block the chain of transmission," Muyembe told AFP.
Later on Wednesday Aruna Abedi, the chief Ebola coordinator in the North Kivu province — which has borne the brunt of the outbreak since it began on August 1 last year — said a third person had tested positive for the disease. Abedi said that vaccination had started at the affected health centre.
"Medical staff and those who had contact with the patient, and those who had contact with them, have been prioritised," he told AFP.
An Ebola response official said the third confirmed case was the one-year-old daughter of the second Goma patient, a father of 10 who had died at the same centre earlier in the week.
"The girl had already been showing signs of the disease," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
North Kivu's capital Goma is a lakeside city of more than two million people that has an airport with flights to the capital Kinshasa, Uganda's Entebbe and Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, as well as a port that links to Bukavu and South Kivu province.
Health experts fear outbreaks in major cities, where population density and high mobility make it far harder to isolate patients and trace contacts compared to the countryside. Abedi earlier said the second fatality had arrived at a treatment centre "11 days after falling ill".
"His was really a hopeless case, because the illness was already at an advanced stage and he died overnight Tuesday." Abedi urged the
public to respond swiftly to symptoms of Ebola and "not hide suspect cases".