The Ebola outbreak emerging in Ituri province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to rise sharply, with cases near 750, deaths reported at 177 and around 1,400 contacts currently being traced, the World Health Organization reported at a news conference on Friday. The latest figures already place the outbreak as the third largest on record, although it was only reported for the first time a week ago, on May 15. And WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the outbreak is still “spreading rapidly.”
A revised WHO assessment has moved the risk level from “high” to “very high” at the national level, while the risk remains “high” at the regional level and “low” at the global level, Tedros added.
WHO officials have acknowledged that a delay in detecting and responding to the outbreak allowed it to spike, and that they are now racing to get ahead of the virus.
WHO representative Dr. Anne Ancia, speaking during today’s briefing from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said that when officials arrived in the area, they discovered that the virus was “already rampant and quietly spreading for some weeks.” In the investigation of the outbreak so far, the first known suspected case was that of a healthcare worker, who developed symptoms on April 24 in Bunia, the capital of Ituri. The WHO only learned of a possible outbreak on May 5, with news of a cluster of unidentified deadly infections that led to the deaths of four healthcare workers. When a WHO team arrived, there were already 80 cases.
“We are now racing behind (the virus) so that we can really try to control this outbreak, and as it is still being transmitted at the moment, yes, the number (of cases) will continue to increase for some time until we can really get all the response operations underway,” he said.
Their work is made difficult by several challenges. The virus behind the Ebola outbreak is the rare Bundibugyo virus, for which no vaccines or therapies have been established. That leaves active case finding, isolation and contact tracing as the main tools to stop the spread. Furthermore, the virus is spreading in areas with armed conflict, intense population mobility, weak health systems and where millions of people face acute hunger and need humanitarian assistance.
