Second Ebola vaccine to be used in Congo: WHO

UN efforts slammed

LONDON, Sept 23, (Agencies): The World Health Organization on Monday announced Congo will start using a second experimental Ebola vaccine, as efforts to stop the deadly outbreak are stalled and Doctors Without Borders criticizes vaccination efforts to date.

Since this outbreak was declared in August 2018, more than 200,000 people have received doses of a vaccine made by Merck which will continue to be used in Congo. The UN health agency in a statement said the second vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson, will be used from October in areas where Ebola is not actively spreading.

Using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine “will ensure that we have potentially an additional tool to prevent the expansion of the outbreak,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s Africa director.

So far, more than 3,030 people have been sickened by the Ebola virus in this outbreak, the secondworst in history, and more than 1,990 have died.

Confusion

The question of whether the Johnson & Johnson experimental vaccine should be used was at the center of a dispute between Congo’s former health minister, Dr Oly Ilunga and global health officials. Ilunga had insisted Congo would not use the vaccine because he said it wasn’t sufficiently tested and would create confusion.

He resigned as the health minister in July after the president replaced him as the head of Congo’s Ebola response team. In his resignation letter, Ilunga criticized the “strong pressure exercised in recent months” to use the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Separately, Doctors Without Borders is seeking an independent committee to oversee Ebola vaccination efforts, similar to those that have been formed internationally to respond to outbreaks of meningitis, yellow fever and cholera.

The medical charity said greater transparency is needed and alleged that WHO is “restricting the availability” of the Merck vaccine in the field. Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym, MSF, said the approximately 225,000 people vaccinated so far is “largely insufficient” and that between 450,000 and 600,000 people should have been immunized by now.

“Not enough people are getting the vaccine because of some arbitrary rules that haven’t been made clear,” Dr Natalie Roberts, emergency coordinator for MSF, told The Associated Press.

She said restricting the vaccine to people who are known contacts of Ebola cases is problematic. “It comes down to very local control, when every morning it’s someone from WHO who decides who is going to be vaccinated and how many vials to open,” she said. “Trying to restrict eligibility for a vaccine for a disease that everybody is afraid of is just not going to work.”

MSF has described WHO’s strategy as “like giving firefighters a bucket of water to put out a fire, but only allowing them to use one cup of water a day.”

There was no immediate response by WHO to a request for comment on the MSF statement.

Roberts said the number of people vaccinated so far is ultimately a damning assessment of response efforts.

“If you had said at the beginning of the outbreak that we were going to vaccinate this many people, you would assume the outbreak would be over by now,” she said. “But clearly the right people were not vaccinated.”

Meanwhile, Tanzania is refusing to provide detailed information on suspected Ebola cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a rare public rebuke as the region struggles with an outbreak already declared a global health emergency.

Transparency and speed are key to combating the deadly hemorrhagic fever because it can spread rapidly. Anyone deemed to have been in contact with potentially infected people must be quarantined and the public warned to step up precautions such as handwashing.

WHO said in a statement late on Saturday that it was made aware on Sept 10 of the death of a patient in Dar es Salaam, and unofficially told the next day that the person tested positive for Ebola. The woman had died on Sept 8.

“Identified contacts of the deceased were unofficially reported to be quarantined in various sites in the country,” the statement said.

WHO said it was unofficially told that Tanzania had two other possible Ebola cases. One had tested negative and there was no information on the other.

Officially, the Tanzanian government said last weekend it had no confirmed or suspected cases of Ebola. The government did not address the death of the woman directly and did not provide further information.

Swine flu:

The Philippines’ Department of Agriculture on Monday said it has detected more African swine fever outbreaks in the country, such as in a village in Antipolo, Rizal, east of the Philippine capital Manila, and some areas in central Luzon

l There are now 12 villages with backyard farms affected by the disease – two in Metro Manila and 10 in nearby Rizal and Bulacan provinces – excluding those central Luzon areas that Agriculture Secretary William Dar declined to identify

l The Philippines, the world’s 10th-largest pork consumer and seventh-biggest pork importer, declared its first outbreak of the virus on Sept 9, with more reported in less than two weeks

Cholera:

The death toll of the cholera epidemic has risen to eight, in addition to 158 infections in southeastern Sudan’s Blue Nile and Sennar states, said Sudanese Health Ministry Sunday.

In a statement, director of the department of emergency and epidemics control at the Sudanese Ministry of Health Babakr Al-Maqbool said that the total number of the infected cases since the outbreak of epidemic on 28 August is 158, including 115 in the Blue Nile State and 43 in Sennar State.