Red Cross in warning over yellow fever crisis
Print Edition
A deadly yellow fever outbreak in Angola, which has already spread the disease as far as China, risks sparking a global crisis, the Red Cross warned yesterday.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies urged immediate action with health director Julie Hall warning that limited vaccine supplies, inadequate disease surveillance systems, poor sanitation and continuous movement across Angola’s borders “could turn a national outbreak into a global crisis.”
“Unvaccinated travellers could transform this outbreak into a regional or international crisis if we don’t move quickly to protect vulnerable populations and help communities to reduce their risk of infection,” she said in a statement.
The warning came as the World Health Organization was holding an emergency meeting yesterday on the Angola outbreak.
Such meetings from the UN agency are often held before the declaration of an international health emergency, as happened with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the current surge in neurological disorders linked to the spread of Zika virus in the Americas.
Yellow fever has been raging since last December in Angola, and especially in the capital Luanda, killing 293 people in the country to date and infecting another 2,267.
Cases have been imported to Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya, and the Angola outbreak has been proven to be the source of 11 infections in China.
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