KINSHASA: The World Health Organization on Tuesday voiced concern about the “scale and speed” of an Ebola outbreak that has killed an estimated 131 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo and warned it could be lengthy.
The UN health agency has declared the surge of the highly contagious haemorrhagic fever an international health emergency and called an urgent meeting on the crisis.
No vaccine or therapeutic treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola which is responsible for the outbreak declared in the east late last week.
Ebola has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the past half-century.
With the recent cases largely concentrated in difficult-to-access areas hit by long-running conflicts, few samples have been laboratory-tested and figures are based mostly on suspected cases.
“We have recorded roughly 131 deaths in total and we have around 513 suspected cases,” Congolese Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba said on national television early Tuesday.
“The deaths we are reporting are all the deaths we have identified in the community, without necessarily saying that they are all linked to Ebola,” he added.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic”.
Speaking from the DRC, Anne Ancia, the WHO’s representative, told reporters in Geneva that a vaccine candidate called Ervebo was among those being looked at but it was likely to take at least “two months for it to be available”.
It could still be useful, she added, since “I don’t think that in two months we will be done with this outbreak”.
The DRC’s deadliest Ebola outbreak, between 2018 and 2020, claimed nearly 2,300 lives from 3,500 cases.
The epicentre of the new cases is in northeastern Ituri province on the border with Uganda and South Sudan.
As a gold-mining hub, it sees people regularly crisscrossing the region and has been plagued by clashes between local militias for years.
The virus has already spread into neighbouring provinces, as well as beyond the DRC’s borders into Uganda.
“Unfortunately, the alert was slow to circulate within the community, because people thought it was a mystical illness, and so, as a result, the sick were not taken to the hospital,” Kamba said.
The Ebola outbreak is the 17th in the vast central African country of more than 100 million people.
Vaccines are only available for the Zaire strain of the disease, which has caused the biggest recorded outbreaks.
Comments