Congo Ebola outbreak met with rapid response after W. Africa crisis
WHO releases $1 mln in funding
MBANDAKA, DR Cango, May 10, (Agencies): Four more cases of Ebola have been detected in northwest Democratic Republic of Congo, doctors said Thursday, two days after DRC reported a fresh outbreak of the disease.
Of the four affected people, two are caregivers at the hospital in Bikoro where the Ebola outbreak has been concentrated, the hospital’s chief surgeon Serge Ngalebato told AFP.
The latest Ebola outbreak in the region northest of Kinshasa near the border with the Republic of Congo has so far killed 17 people.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has made $1 million (842,000 euros) available to stop the virus from spreading to other provinces and countries, a representative of the UN’s humanitarian affairs agency OCHA told reporters.
The Nigerian government on Wednesday said it was acting to prevent the spread of Ebola from the vast central African country.
The federal government had put in place an emergency programme to monitor all border activity to keep Nigerians safe, Health Minister Isaac Adewole said after a cabinet meeting.
Nigeria, which does not share a border with the DR Congo, is the only country in West Africa with a mobile laboratory for haemorrhagic fevers.
DR Congo authorities on Tuesday described the Ebola outbreak as a “public health emergency with international impact”.
It is the country’s ninth known outbreak of Ebola since 1976, when the deady viral disease was first identified in then Zaire by a Belgian-led team.
Six months after an Ebola outbreak was confirmed in West Africa in March 2014, the World Health Organization declared an international emergency and called for help. The disease went on to ravage three countries and kill over 11,000 people.
“I think with this rapid response we will be able to contain it,” WHO emergencies director for Africa, Ibrahima Soce Fall, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Very clearly” the UN agency learned its lesson from the crisis, he added.
WHO is conducting an investigation to see how many people may have come in contact with the infected and is prepared to use a new experimental vaccine if needed, said Fall.
The agency was criticized for its slow response to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, which was the largest in history.
“In the past we didn’t have this emergency system. It’s completely different,” Fall said, adding that this response was also faster than that in Congo last year.
The cases were first reported on May 3, and medical teams supported by WHO and medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) went to take samples two days later.
“That seems to me to be about as fast as you can reasonably expect,” said Jimmy Whitworth, a specialist in epidemiology and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Cases of hemorrhagic fever were reported in an area of Congo that is facing an Ebola epidemic as far back as December and the first deaths were reported in January, a spokesman for the World Health Organization said in the capital Kinshasa on Thursday.
A timespan as long as five months since the first infection would be alarming, since it gives the virus a head start in infecting lots of people before action was taken to contain it.
“According to our early information, the cases have been reported since December and the first deaths were reported in January, but the link between the deaths and the epidemic has not yet been established,” WHO Congo spokesman Eugene Kabambi told Reuters.
The health ministry said on Thursday it had dispatched a team of 12 experts to the area to try to trace new contacts of the disease, identify all affected villages and provide resources to combat the epidemic.