The spread of Ebola to a major city in Democratic Republic of Congo is worrying, but the outlook is much more optimistic than when a major outbreak was reported in West Africa in 2014, the head of the World Health Organisation said on Monday.
“It’s concerning that we now have cases of Ebola in an urban centre, but we are much better placed to deal with this outbreak than we were in 2014,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom told health ministers at the start of the WHO’s annual assembly.
“I’m pleased to say that vaccination is starting as we speak.”
DRC Health Minister Oly Ilunga said on Monday that the death toll from the outbreak had risen to 26, after a person died in the northwest city of Mbandaka.
“A death was recorded (on Sunday), while two people who had been confirmed as ill with the Ebola virus were cured on Saturday,” he said.
“The two people who were cured have returned to their families,” he told reporters.
Those two cases occurred at Bikoro, a remote rural area, where the outbreak was announced on May 8 before spreading to Mbandaka — an event that has deeply worried health experts.
The current toll was 49 cases, consisting of 22 confirmed by laboratory tests, 21 probable cases and six suspected cases, Ilunga said.
Three new cases had been reported on Saturday.
Authorities in the DRC on Monday were to launch a programme to immunise first responders with an experimental Ebola vaccine.
The first phase will unfold in Mbandaka on Monday, followed on Saturday in Bikoro, about 150km away.
Donors have promised 300,000 doses of the vaccine, a government spokesman said, of which around 5,400 have already been received.
WHO has dispatched 35 immunisation experts, including 16 mobilised during the last deadly outbreak, in West Africa in 2013. The rest of the team is made up of newly trained Congolese staff.
Alarm
Alarm bells sounded on Thursday when a first case was reported in Mbandaka, a city of about 1.2-million people on the Congo River.
A major transport hub, the city is located upstream from the DRC capital of Kinshasa as well as Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, and downstream from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, one of the poorest countries in the world.
One of the world’s most notorious diseases, Ebola is a virus-caused haemorrhagic fever that in extreme cases causes fatal bleeding from internal organs, the mouth, eyes or ears.
It has a natural reservoir in a species of tropical African fruit bats, from which it is believed to leap to humans who kill the animals for food.
Transmission among humans then typically spreads through close contact with the blood, body fluids, secretions or organs of someone who is sick with Ebola or has recently died.
The average fatality rate is 50%, varying from 25% to 90%, according to the WHO.
This outbreak is the ninth in DRC since the disease was first identified in 1976. It was named after a Congolese river where the first cases were recorded.
The last outbreak was in 2017, and was rapidly curtailed with four deaths.
Reuters/AFP