Medics battle to stop Ebola spreading

Three patients infected with the Ebola virus escaped from a hospital holding them in quarantine in Mbandaka, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), an aid group said, as medics raced to stop the disease spreading in the teeming river port.

Two of the patients got out on Monday but were found dead a day later, said Henri Gray, the head of the Medecins Sans Frontieres mission in the city. Another left on Saturday but was found alive the same day and is now under observation, he said.

“This is a hospital. It’s not a prison. We can’t lock everything,” Gray said.

The report came as the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that the fight to stop the DRC’s ninth confirmed outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever had reached a critical point.

“The next few weeks will really tell if this outbreak is going to expand to urban areas or if we’re going to be able to keep it under control,” the WHO’s emergency response chief, Peter Salama, told ministers and diplomats in Geneva.

“We’re on the epidemiological knife edge of this response,” he said at the UN body’s annual assembly.

Health officials are concerned by the disease’s presence in Mbandaka, a crowded trading hub upstream from the capital, Kinshasa, a city of some 10-million people.

The river also runs along the border with the Republic of Congo. /