By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Health officials in Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday declared the end of an outbreak of deadly Ebola haemorrhagic fever, believed to have killed up to 187 people over 8 months.

Congo's Health Ministry and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that a 42-day period following the death of the last Ebola victim had ended on November 13.

Despite not recording a new Ebola infection in over a month and a half, officials said it was standard practice to wait 42 days -- twice Ebola's maximum incubation period -- before announcing the end of an outbreak.

"In view of the positive results attained, it is my duty to announce today ... the end of the Ebola epidemic," Health Minister Victor Makwenge Kaput told journalists in the capital, Kinshasa.

People began falling ill in April in the village of Kampungu in Western Kasai province with Ebola-like symptoms, including fever and muscle pain, followed by vomiting, diarrhoea and internal haemorrhaging. The presence of the disease was not confirmed until September.

Experts from the WHO and the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) rushed to bring in tonnes of medical equipment and sanitation products, and two mobile laboratories to help deal with the crisis.

The remoteness of the affected areas and Congo's lack of infrastructure, much of it damaged by years of neglect and a 1998-2003 war, magnified the problems of tackling the outbreak in the former Belgian colony.

It remains unclear how many of a total of 264 suspected cases were due to Ebola, which has no cure and kills 50 to 90 percent of its victims.

Outbreaks of typhoid fever and Shigella, a bacterial infection, both of which have symptoms similar to Ebola, occurred simultaneously in the affected areas. Of 110 samples taken from suspected Ebola victims, 26 tested positive for the disease.

The health officials said on Monday that epidemiologists were trying to determine the origin of the outbreak, which they suspect may have been transmitted by migrating bats which were hunted and eaten by local villagers.

Ebola is transmitted by contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected persons. Western Kasai is east of Kikwit, the site of an Ebola outbreak in 1995 in the former Zaire which killed 250 out of 315 people infected. (Editing by Daniel Flynn)

AlertNet news is provided by