Ebola: Act now, WHO tells DR Congo’s neighbours

States neighbouring the Democratic Republic of Congo are at great danger from Ebola and should act immediately to counter the deadly virus, the head of the World Health Organisation said on Monday.

“Countries bordering DRC are at especially high risk and should take immediate action,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, adding that he would travel today to the DRC, the vast, central African country at the epicentre of the current outbreak.

“The outbreak is spreading rapidly,” Tedros told a virtual ministerial meeting on the viral haemorrhagic fever, which spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can cause severe bleeding and organ failure.

He said the current outbreak was “especially challenging”.

“First, the delay in detecting the outbreak means that we are now playing catch-up with a very fast-moving epidemic. We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment, the epidemic is outpacing us,” he said by video link from Geneva.
Secondly, the eastern provinces of the DRC, where the outbreak was first detected in mid-May, “are highly insecure, with intensified fighting in recent months, and there is also significant distrust of outside authorities among the local population”.

Thirdly, he pointed out, there were “no approved vaccines or therapeutics” for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola behind the current outbreak.

The WHO has recorded 10 confirmed Ebola deaths and 220 suspected deaths in the DRC since mid-May, while also recording a further 900 suspected cases since Kinshasa declared the outbreak on May 15.
The United Nations agency said the true spread of the virus, which experts suspect was circulating under the radar for some time, was probably much wider.

One person is confirmed dead in neighbouring Uganda, with a further six confirmed infected after Monday, when the health ministry confirmed two new cases.

Ten other African countries are “at risk” of infection, the African Union’s health agency, Africa CDC, warned on Saturday.

These are Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.