The director general (DG) of the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday the situation with the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains “not under control,” with the response to the outbreak still catching up to the disease after weeks of it circulating undetected before being formally identified.
He added that the outbreak was spreading “faster than any previous Ebola epidemic” and that the likelihood of the virus spreading to other countries was high.
The warning came after Monday’s confirmation by Congolese authorities that the outbreak, which is occurring in the north and east of the DRC, has killed over 2,300 people out of nearly 5,000 total cases to date, making it the deadliest Ebola outbreak in the country’s history. It was declared on May 15, though evidence suggests it may have been circulating for several weeks prior, and has so far primarily affected rural and underdeveloped regions with few official medical resources and a long history of conflict.
The virus has spread to six provinces in DRC, as well as to Uganda, with instances of infections occurring close to the South Sudan border.
By comparison, the 2018-2020 DRC Ebola outbreak, which was also the second-deadliest in history after the 2013-2016 West Africa outbreak, killed 2,299 people out of 3,400 total cases. The largest-ever Ebola outbreak, also in West Africa from 2013-2016, killed over 11,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
Tuesday’s emergency committee meeting marks the second one since the WHO classified the current Ebola outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) back in May, with the second-highest level of alarm on the organization’s international health emergency scale. Details on when the recommendations from the emergency committee meeting would be released were not given, but the WHO currently assesses the risk of the virus to the public health as very high in the DRC, high in Uganda and neighboring countries, and low elsewhere on the continent and the world. The organization also notes that there are currently no approved treatments or vaccines for the specific strain of Ebola responsible for the outbreak, though several are being tested.
Commenting on that last point, considering it involves both an extremely severe loss of life and a critical medical humanitarian crisis, let me know if you’d also like to see an update on either the vaccine candidates or the broader WHO response, including funding.
