Today's edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune carries a story out of Kinshasa, Congo, which reveals that for the first time EVER, the deadly and virtually incurable Ebola disease has been detected in a major urban area within the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Previous outbreaks of Ebola in the Congo were generally recorded in small hamlets and villages out in the wilderness, which makes the detection of this modern plague in a CITY, very alarming indeed, given the air-links that connect most cities of the world.

Here is the verbatim cut-and-paste COPY of the original article in the San Diego Union-Tribune of today, May 18th 2018.

" KINSHASA, Congo Congo’s Ebola outbreak has spread to a crossroads city of more than 1 million people in a troubling turn that marks the first time the vast, impoverished country has encountered the lethal virus in an urban area.

“This is a major, major game-changer in the outbreak,” Dr. Peter Salama, the World Health Organization’s deputy director-general of emergency preparedness and response, warned on Thursday. A single case of Ebola was confirmed in Mbandaka, a densely populated provincial capital on the Congo River, Congo’s Health Minister Oly Ilunga said late Wednesday. The city isabout90miles from Bikoro, the rural area where the outbreak was announced last week.

Late Thursday, Congo’s Ministry of Health announced 11 new confirmed Ebola cases and two deaths tied to cases in the country’s northwest, including one in a suburb of Mbandaka. A total of 45 cases of Ebola have now been reported in Congo in this outbreak: 14 confirmed, 21 probable and 10 suspected, the ministry said. There has been one new death in Bikoro, where the first death took place. That new death had epidemiological ties to another case.

The other death was a suspected case in Wangata, a suburb of Mbandaka on the Congo River, the ministry said. No details were given on the death’s links to the newly confirmed case. Only one of the 25 dead has been confirmed as Ebola, it said, adding that no health professionals have been contaminated. One nurse had died, and three others were among suspected cases since the outbreak began.

Medical teams have been rushing to track down anyone thought to have had contact with infected people, while WHO is shipping thousands of doses of an experimental vaccine. Mbandaka,a city of almost 1.2 million, is in a busy travel corridor in Congo’s northwest Equateur province and is upstream from the capital, Kinshasa, a city of about 10 million. It is an hour’s plane ride from Kinshasa. "

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