BUNIA:
Twenty-six more suspected Ebola deaths were recorded in 24 hours in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, authorities said on Tuesday, and the head of the World Health Organization expressed deep concern about the outbreak’s spread.
The new deaths brought to 131 the fatalities associated with the outbreak in eastern DRC. There have been 543 suspected cases and 33 confirmed cases in DRC, according to Congolese health authorities, and two confirmed cases in neighbouring Uganda.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus a public health emergency of international concern on Saturday, the first time a WHO chief has done so before convening an emergency committee.
The outbreak has alarmed experts because it was able to spread for weeks undetected across a densely populated area ravaged by widespread armed violence. A 2018-2020 outbreak in eastern DRC was the second deadliest on record, killing nearly 2,300 people.
Butembo, a city of hundreds of thousands of people, recorded its first two confirmed cases on Monday, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director of Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB), told Reuters.
Ugandan authorities have started restricting movement across the Ishasha-Kyeshero border crossing, Ambrose Amanyire Mwesigye, a local government official, told Reuters, though he said the border was not formally closed.
Further south, Congolese people trying to cross into Rwanda from the cities of Goma and Bukavu were being stopped at the border, Reuters reporters said. Rwandan officials could not immediately be reached for comment. The WHO had on Saturday urged countries not to close their borders, saying this could lead to informal border crossings that are not monitored.
Ebola, which spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids from infected people or animals, has an average fatality rate of around 50%, according to the WHO. “I’m deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic,” Tedros told members of the World Health Assembly in Geneva on Tuesday.
WHO’s representative in DRC, Anne Ancia, said identifying cases was slowed by limited diagnostic capacity for the Bundibugyo strain, with just six tests possible per hour.
Experts say the delays in detecting the outbreak show gaps in preparedness following cutbacks by the US and other major donors to global health funding.
“We seemed to have wasted a pandemic because everybody has gone back to doing what they’re doing,” Sierra Leone’s health minister, Austin Demby, said in Geneva.
One American has tested positive for Ebola, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday.
The individual, identified as Dr Peter Stafford by his Christian mission organisation, and six other Americans who were exposed to the virus were being moved to Germany for care and monitoring, the CDC said. Reuters
