Authorities say a mysterious illness has killed dozens of people in Congo

A mysterious illness with flu-like symptoms has killed dozens of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to health authorities there.

According to the country’s Ministry of Public Health, Hygiene and Social Security, 79 people have died from the unknown disease and 376 have fallen ill as of Tuesday.

In a statement to

Reported symptoms include fever, headache, nasal congestion, cough, difficulty breathing and anemia.

Local authorities told Reuters and The Associated Press that the death toll could be as high as 143.

The Health Ministry said the remains of people who died due to similar symptoms should not be handled without the involvement of authorized health authorities and urged people to report suspicious illnesses or unusual deaths. The office also advised people to avoid mass gatherings and follow basic hygiene rules, including washing hands with soap and water.

According to the ministry, emergency public health workers have been deployed to the region.

The World Health Organization told NBC News it was aware of reports of an unidentified illness and was working with local authorities.

“We have sent a team to the remote area to collect samples for laboratory testing,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jašarević said in an email.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has an office in Congo, said it was aware of the situation and was providing technical assistance to a rapid response team sent from a local emergency center.

Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked in Congo since 2002, said diagnosing the diseases could be complicated by limited health infrastructure and because of underlying health problems in a portion of the population, including malaria and malnutrition.

“I think it’s really important to be aware of what’s happening and I think it’s also really important not to panic until we have more information,” she said.

“It could be anything,” she added. “It could be flu, it could be Ebola, it could be Marburg, it could be meningitis, it could be measles. At this point we just don’t know.”

Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease doctor at Stanford Medicine, said the outbreak is “setting off alarm bells” because of its location. Interactions between humans and wildlife in Congo increase the risk of a pathogen being transmitted from animals, he said, and “many animal infections that are transmitted from animals to humans can cause quite serious illness.”

To identify the disease, Karan said local health authorities would first screen for common illnesses such as flu or malaria before testing for less common pathogens. If all of those tests come back negative, officials could genetically sequence tissue, blood, mucus or bone marrow from infected people, he said.

At the same time, international teams on the ground will collect information about what risk factors sick people had in common and who they were in contact with, said Amira Albert Roess, a professor of global health and epidemiology at George Mason University.

“I think we’ll have an answer pretty quickly as to what that is,” Roess said, noting that there have been “a lot of deaths with the same symptoms, especially in such a short period of time.”