Via Radio Okapi: Ebola in Mbandaka: death of a 4th confirmed case. The Google translation, with my bolding:
The fourth confirmed case of the Ebola virus disease died on Friday May 20 in Mbandaka. This is the fourth recorded since the outbreak of the epidemic on April 21. He was discovered on Thursday in the Maman Balako health area, Wangata health zone and commune.
Only 24 hours after his discovery, the patient died, after having dragged around the community for a long time without proper care.
Medical sources claim that the victim was a 12-year-old child in the Maman Balako health area. Since May 14, he had been developing symptoms of Ebola, including fever, fatigue, blackish vomit.
For five days, he was cared for at home, until Thursday, May 19; date on which he was taken to a medical center in the Mbandaka II district. The results of the analysis of the samples taken on the same day from the child were found to be positive for the Ebola virus disease.
But the family resisted and brought the child home on Thursday evening, where he passed away on Friday morning.
Sources add that another 9-year-old child died with the same symptoms, in the same neighborhood, on May 6 and buried, without post-mortem collection or a dignified and secure burial. This raises fears of a multiplication of cases.
The response teams are preparing for the decontamination of different places, through which the deceased child passed. They seek the cooperation of the populations around the case and in the health area concerned.
They also invite the inhabitants to appropriate all the preventive measures recently enacted by the provincial authority, in order to avoid a large-scale spread of the disease. Among these measures, there is a compulsory post-mortem sample before any burial of bodies in the city.
