adminThe European Medical Corps (EMC) recently set up by the EU is being sent on its first mission — to help tackle the outbreak of yellow fever in Angola.
Since the first case of the mosquito-transmitted disease was reported in the capital, Luanda, in December 2015, 293 people have died, amid some 2,267 reported cases.
The EMC was created in February in the wake of the west Africa Ebola crisis, during which some 11,000 people died of the disease. It has ready-to-deploy teams from nine EU member states — Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden — and is part of the European Emergency Response Capacity, under the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.
The commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis management, Christos Stylianides, said: “We’ve learned the lessons from the Ebola crisis.
“Today, we’re deploying a first team of public health experts as part of the European Medical Corps. They’ll complement the efforts of the Angolan government and work closely with the World Health Organisation and other international partners on the ground to deal with the yellow fever outbreak. Together we can understand it better and stop it faster.”
The European Commission’s humanitarian aid and civil protection department says that during the two-week mission the EMC team, made up of experts from Germany, Portugal and Belgium, will investigate the epidemiological characteristics of the outbreak.
It will also assess the risk of it spreading further —including outside Angola — look at the implications for European travellers to the country, and help local doctors. The virus has spread to the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cases have been reported in Kenya, Uganda and Mauritania. A number of cases have been reported in China among workers returning home from Angola.
American doctors, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, have warned it could become a global crisis due to a lack of vaccines, which take six months to produce.
In Angola, which suffered previous outbreaks in 1971 and 1988, about five million people have been vaccinated, according to the World Health Organisation, out of a population of 24 million. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, vaccination is advised for visitors.
Yellow fever is an acute viral haemorrhagic disease for which there is no cure. Initial symptoms include backache, muscle pain, fever, headache and shivering. — The Gurdian
Online Reporter