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Doctors Link Risky Burials to Ebola Rise in West Africa

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nytimes.com - by Adam Nossiter - May 19, 2015

Only days after declaring the lowest number of new Ebola cases in Guinea and Sierra Leone this year, officials at the World Health Organization said Tuesday that there had been a nearly fourfold increase during the most recent week of reporting, to about 35 new cases.

With Liberia, the other West African nation at the center of the epidemic, being declared free of Ebola this month, the recent drop in infections in Sierra Leone and Guinea had offered hope that the worst Ebola outbreak in history might end soon. . . .

. . . Health officials said that sharp falls and rises were normal as an epidemic approached its end. But they also said that some persistent risky practices, like unsafe burials of Ebola victims in Guinea, had contributed to the rise.

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un.org - May 20, 2015

. . . “because of the proximity to Guinea-Bissau of the recent cluster of cases in the Guinean prefecture of Boké, a response team from Guinea-Bissau has been deployed to the border to assess points of entry,” WHO reported. “An epidemiological investigation team has also mobilized to ensure any contacts who cross the border are traced.”

Guinea Bissau has so far not reported any Ebola cases.

“The cases in Boké were tightly clustered in the coastal sub-prefecture of Kamsar, and initial investigations suggest they may have originated from a chain of transmission in Conakry,” according to the update.

WHO said although the exact origin of the cluster in Boké is unknown, an investigation has linked most of the confirmed cases to four probable cases who attended a funeral of another probable case in mid-April, which may have been the source of the outbreak.

“Difficulty engaging local communities has made case investigation and contact tracing in the area challenging,” it noted.

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http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cd5a8b32c26a489d9706c8286c93d682/guinea-reports-27-new-ebola-cases-after-previous-lull

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