WHO: Ebola risk high regionally as DR Congo awaits medical aid

The risk from a deadly Ebola outbreak is high in central Africa but remains low globally, the World Health Organisation said Wednesday, adding that the virus had likely been spreading for months. The outbreak of the highly contagious haemorrhagic fever was declared in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo last Friday. Ebola has killed more than […]

The risk from a deadly Ebola outbreak is high in central Africa but remains low globally, the World Health Organisation said Wednesday, adding that the virus had likely been spreading for months.

The outbreak of the highly contagious haemorrhagic fever was declared in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo last Friday.

Ebola has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the past half-century, and the UN health agency has declared the latest surge an international health emergency.

The 17th Ebola outbreak to hit the DRC is already suspected of having caused 139 deaths from around 600 probable cases.

“We expect those numbers to keep increasing, given the amount of time the virus was circulating before the outbreak was detected,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.

“Given the scale, we are thinking that it has started probably a couple of months ago,” said Anais Legand, WHO technical officer on viral haemorrhagic fevers.

At a hospital near conflict-torn Ituri’s main city, Bunia, equipment to isolate suspected cases of Ebola and full protective gear for nurses has only just begun arriving.

“We dig graves and bury dead people without gloves or any protection,” said Salama Bamunoba, a youth organisation representative.

On Sunday, Tedros declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern – the second-highest level of alarm under the legally-binding International Health Regulations (IHR).

But he said on Wednesday it had been determined that the situation was “not a pandemic emergency”.

Following a meeting of the WHO’s emergency committee, he said the agency “assesses the risk of the epidemic as high at the national and regional levels, and low at the global level”.

The European Commission in Brussels insisted that the risk of infection in the EU was “very low” and that “there is no indication” that Europeans should take specific measures.

Medical aid awaited

At the hospital in Rwampara, one of the epicentres of the outbreak, a simple plastic strip marked off the isolation centre for patients that was yet to be built.

The response is slow to get off the ground in the vast central African country, where the highly contagious haemorrhagic fever has hit hard-to-reach eastern regions, beset for years by armed groups.

The hospital is only about 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) from Bunia, the main city in Ituri, one of the country’s most violence-hit provinces.

But equipment to isolate and treat those infected by Ebola, which is transmitted through close contact, only began arriving in Rwampara on Monday, several days after the outbreak was declared.

“We dig graves and bury dead people without gloves or any protection,” said Salama Bamunoba, a youth organisation representative.

No vaccine or specific treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, responsible for the new outbreak, which Congolese authorities say is suspected to have killed more than 130 people.

“Setting up an appropriate area for triage and isolation was our main concern,” Bamunoba said.

But, he added, “the government and its partners really dragged their feet”.

In town, the dusty streets were busy as usual with people and motorcycles, and shoppers still strolled around market stalls, while schools remained open.

‘Suspect cases’

In Rwampara and other villages outside the city of Bunia, home to more than a million people and tens of thousands of others displaced by conflict, worry has begun to spread among the population.

“We treated this epidemic like a joke, but today we can see that the situation is becoming more and more serious,” resident Gims Maniwa said.

“Here, in Congo, a lot of things are done carelessly, and that’s not good,” he added.

Congolese Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamaba has said that the authorities have “everything that healthcare providers will need”.

The government spokesman on Tuesday highlighted the DRC’s longstanding experience in handling Ebola outbreaks, mostly without vaccines.

The previous large-scale surge of Ebola in the country’s east, plagued for three decades by conflict, killed nearly 2,300 people, out of 3,500 cases between 2018 and 2020.

On the tarmac at Bunia airport, dozens of staff of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in fluorescent vests busily unloaded boxes from a cargo plane.

Protective kits and tents were among 12 tonnes of medical supplies that the WHO announced on Tuesday had been delivered to the regions hit by the virus.

Tons of supplies piled up in the warehouses of the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Bunia, including crucial personal protective equipment kits intended for health teams, who are particularly exposed.

The Ebola outbreak has struck as NGOs struggle with cuts in international aid, especially in the United States, since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House last year.

The protective gear “is going to be a huge relief for a lot of our teams”, MSF emergency programme manager Trish Newport said.

She said the health facilities in the region were full of suspected cases.

“Every facility they (the MSF team) called said: ‘We are full of suspect cases. We don’t have any space’. This gives you a vision of how crazy it is right now,” she added.

“What is really important is that we get material on the ground as quickly as possible.”