A previously unknown disease making the rounds in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a severe form of malaria, the country’s health ministry has announced.
Health authorities on Tuesday said the disease, circulating in the southwestern Kwango province, presents in the form of a respiratory illness.
Earlier this month, local authorities said the disease had killed 143 people in the country’s Panzi health zone in November, as fears surmounted about the mysterious illness.
“The mystery has finally been solved. It’s a case of severe malaria in the form of a respiratory illness,” the Ministry of Public Health said in a statement, adding that malnutrition in the area had weakened the local population, leaving them more vulnerable to disease.
The statement said that 592 cases had been reported since October, with a fatality rate of 6.2 percent.
Provincial health minister, Apollinaire Yumba, told the Reuters news agency that anti-malaria medicine provided by the World Health Organization was being distributed in the main hospital and health centres in the Panzi health zone.
A WHO spokesperson said more health kits for moderate and critical cases were due to arrive on Wednesday.
The symptoms of the disease are fever, headache, cough, runny nose and body aches.
Most of the cases and deaths are in children under 14, according to national health authorities, with children under five representing the majority of cases.
“Respiratory distress was noted in some children and some other people who died,” Congolese Minister of Health Roger Kamba said earlier this month, noting that some patients were anaemic, which was the cause of some of the deaths linked to the disease.
The outbreak of the disease is some 700km (435 miles) away from DRC’s capital, Kinshasa, with the Panzi health zone “rural and remote”, the WHO has said, which added challenges in investigating it.
A doctor at Panzi Hospital told Al Jazeera last week that the facility was not sufficiently equipped to deal with the outbreak.
According to the Severe Malaria Observatory, the DRC has the second-highest number of malaria cases and deaths globally. Malaria is also the country’s leading cause of death, according to the observatory.