Trump urged to allow US experts to combat second largest Ebola outbreak in history
GLOBAL HEALTH experts are urging the Trump administration to allow US government disease specialists to return to northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo to help fight the secondlargest Ebola outbreak in history.
The US experts have been sidelined for weeks, ordered away from the region because of State Department security concerns.
New statements in two top medical journals this week have called on the US to change its mind and send them back where they are sorely needed.
This Ebola outbreak is like no other, as health workers compare the region to a war zone.
Dozens of armed rebel groups are active and their deadly attacks have forced responders to pause crucial containment work for days. Many new cases have been unrelated to known infections, alarming evidence that gaps in tracking remain.
Officials have declared this outbreak second only to the devastating West Africa one that killed more than 11,000 from 2014-2016.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s health ministry said the number of confirmed and probable cases has reached 426, edging past the Uganda outbreak in 2000. So far this outbreak has 198 confirmed deaths and 47 probable ones. “It is in US national interests to control outbreaks before they escalate into a crisis,” one group of global health experts said in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A statement in the
said: “Given the worsening of the outbreak, we believe it’s essential these security concerns be addressed and staff return to the field.”
It is not clear how many Centres for Disease Control and Prevention workers are now forced to tackle the outbreak from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa nearly 1,000 miles away.