Kenya records a second Ebola death, and health workers in Congo start a vaccine trial against a strain with no approved vaccine

Kenya has lost a second person to Ebola. The health ministry said late on Friday that a 65 year old woman died that evening after developing symptoms while in quarantine. She was a close relative and direct contact of Kenya’s first patient, a man who traveled from Congo to Nairobi and died at a Nairobi hospital on October 5. She had been receiving supportive care at an infectious disease unit in the capital since her symptoms began on October 13.

Kenya now counts nine confirmed cases and two deaths, as of October 24. The remaining seven patients are being treated at two isolation facilities. They include relatives of the first patient, health workers and a hospital cleaner. Authorities traced 135 contacts of the first man and placed them in quarantine, and the ministry said all of Kenya’s cases remain inside that one cluster, with no evidence of community spread. Some contacts who finished 21 days of quarantine without symptoms were due to start being released on Saturday.

The wider outbreak is the largest of its kind by geography. It began in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which declared its seventeenth and worst Ebola outbreak in May, and it has now been reported in four countries, Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria, across eastern, central and western Africa. Nigeria confirmed its first case on Tuesday, and officials there are still working out how the patient caught the virus, because she had not traveled to Congo. In Congo itself, the virus has infected nearly 10,000 people and killed more than 4,600, as of October 23. The American State Department this week advised Americans to reconsider travel to Kenya because of the health risk.

The strain behind the outbreak is the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, which has no approved vaccine and no approved treatment. The disease spreads through contact with the bodily fluids of a sick person, and only people showing symptoms can pass it on. It brings fever, vomiting and diarrhea and, in severe cases, internal and external bleeding.

The one tool being tested at scale is a vaccine built for a different strain. The World Health Organization said the first participants in the Tumaini trial were vaccinated on Friday in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province at the center of the Congo epidemic. The trial gives the Ervebo vaccine, approved against the Zaire strain, to people at high risk, including contacts of confirmed cases, to learn whether it offers cross protection against Bundibugyo. Two vaccines designed specifically for Bundibugyo, one from the University of Oxford and one from Moderna, are expected to join the same trial framework shortly, after smaller early stage studies.