The Ebola outbreak in Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo is growing rapidly, with close to 750 cases, 177 deaths and about 1,400 contacts now being traced, the World Health Organization said in a press briefing on Friday. The latest figures already rank the outbreak as the third largest on record, although it was first reported a week earlier on May 15. And WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the outbreak was still “spreading rapidly.”
Tedros said the revised WHO assessment raised the risk level from “high” to “very high” at the national level, while the risk remained “high” at the regional level and “low” at the global level.
WHO officials have acknowledged that delays in detecting and responding to the outbreak enabled it to spread, and they are now in a race to get ahead of the virus.
WHO representative Dr. Anne Ancia, speaking during today’s briefing from the DRC, said that when officials arrived in the area, they found that the virus was “already spreading extensively and had been spreading quietly for some weeks.” In the investigation into the outbreak so far, the earliest known suspected case was a health worker who developed symptoms on April 24 in Bunia, the capital of Ituri. WHO became aware of the possible outbreak only on May 5, when a cluster of deadly, unidentified infections was reported, leading to the deaths of four health workers. By the time the WHO team arrived, 80 cases had been reported.
“Now we’re running back [the virus] So that we can really try to control this outbreak, and because it’s still circulating, yes, the numbers [of cases] This will continue to increase for some time until we are able to actually implement all response operations,” she said.
Their work has become difficult due to various challenges. The virus behind the Ebola outbreak is the unusual Bundibugyo virus, which has no established vaccine or treatment. This leaves active case finding, isolation and contact tracing as the primary tools to stop the spread. Furthermore, the virus is spreading in areas with armed conflict, rapid population mobility, weak health systems, and where millions of people are facing severe hunger and are in need of humanitarian assistance.
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