Just as the latest delta-driven wave of SARS-CoV-2 washes over parts of the US that already benefit from some of the country’s highest vaccination rates, the WHO has dispatched an advance team of researchers and doctors to South Sudan, situated in Northern Africa, where 89 people have been killed already by some strange new virus, according to the Daily Mail.
South Sudan’s ministry of health reported that an unknown disease had killed scores of people in the northern town of Fangak in Jonglei state. So the WHO dispatched a team to the area, which is one of the worst-hit places on the entire Continent to be afflicted by a recent severe flooding, to collect samples from sick people. Doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières are already preparing a mobile clinic in Rubkona town.
According to the Daily Mail and BBC, “we decided to send a rapid response team to go and do risk assessment and investigation; that is when they will be able to collect samples from the sick people – but provisionally the figure that we got was that there were 89 deaths,” said the WHO’s Sheila Baya.
Baya said the team of scientists had to reach Fangak via a helicopter due to severe flooding in the area, adding that the group are waiting for transport to return them to the capital Juba on Wednesday.
“We are extremely concerned about malnutrition, with severe acute malnutrition levels two times the WHO threshold, and the number of children admitted to our hospital with severe malnutrition doubling since the start of the floods,” MSF said.
Meanwhile, some 700K people have been impacted by the flooding in the area, including food shortages and illnesses, which are putting tremendous strain on what few health care resources are available in the area.
But seeing as the omicron variant seemingly first emerged from southern Africa (at least, as far as we know), the whole world is probably wondering: what fresh hell might this be?
