The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has spread to a sixth province, with government figures showing 4,381 confirmed cases and 2,011 deaths. The World Health Organization warns it could become the deadliest outbreak on record.
DR reports that the outbreak is now registered in six provinces, according to Africa CDC, the African Union’s public health agency. WHO says the outbreak could surpass every previous one if the current trend continues.
WHO Africa director Mohamed Janabi told a press conference that responders are chasing the virus and that the virus is ahead of them, AP reports. AP also notes that the outbreak has spread beyond known chains of transmission.
The outbreak was officially declared on May 15 this year, but health authorities believe the virus began spreading in February. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that it could exceed the 2014 to 2016 West Africa epidemic, in which more than 11,000 people died.
The pace of deaths has accelerated. The first 1,000 deaths were recorded over nine weeks, and the toll then doubled in about three weeks, according to government data cited by AP. Measured from the first confirmed case, the current outbreak reached 2,000 deaths nearly three times faster than the West Africa epidemic.
It is already the second largest outbreak on record by number of registered cases. Per AP, 45.9 percent of confirmed cases in the current outbreak have ended in death, compared with 39.6 percent in 2014 to 2016. WHO hopes to reverse the trend within three months, which it says means bringing transmission under control rather than ending the outbreak.
Conflict limits access to patients
The outbreak has mainly hit eastern DR Congo, a region marked by decades of violent conflict. According to WHO, health workers are reaching only about 30 percent of cases. Some early cases were wrongly assessed as malaria and typhoid, which delayed detection of the outbreak’s scale.
Authorities have restricted public gatherings and closed the largest airport in Ituri province to slow transmission. The aid organization Mercy Corps warned on Thursday of the risk of spread to South Sudan. Confirmed cases have been registered just 35 kilometers from the border, the organization says.
The outbreak is caused by the rare Bundibugyo variant, which has previously caused only two known outbreaks, in 2007 and 2012. There is no approved vaccine or recognized medicine specifically for the variant. British medicines regulators have authorized the first human trials of a Bundibugyo vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Oxford, built on the same technology as the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid-19 vaccine.
WHO states that patient enrolment in its PARTNERS trial began on July 2, testing whether MBP134, remdesivir, or both improve survival. The trial is coordinated with INRB, the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium, and the University of Oxford, with support from Africa CDC.
DW adds that a separate trial for high-risk contacts is running at treatment centers in eastern DR Congo, with participants monitored for 42 days.
