Urgent bid for Ebola vaccine in DR Congo

GENEVA: The World Health Organisation said it hoped to send an experimental Ebola vaccine to try out on an outbreak in a remote area of Congo to prevent it spreading, particularly to the provincial capital of 1 million people.

Congo reported the outbreak on Tuesday, with 32 suspected, probable or confirmed cases of the disease since April 4, including 18 deaths.

A new suspected case was reported on Friday.

The WHO is moving quickly, having been criticised for bungling its response to a 2014-2016 outbreak that killed more than 11 300 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

“We are very concerned and planning for all scenarios,” said Peter Salama, the WHO’s deputy director- general of emergency preparedness and response.

The outbreak area is 15 hours by motorbike from the closest town and has “dire” infrastructure, Salama said, so the WHO wants to send in 20-40 experts by helicopter this weekend and then clear an airstrip for more supplies.

“This is going to be tough and it’s going to be costly to stamp out this outbreak,” he said. The immediate risk was to the provincial capital, Mbandaka, with about 1 mil- lion inhabitants, but Congo’s nine neighbours have also been put on high alert in case the disease crossed a border, especially by river to the Republic of Congo or Central African Republic.

Normally a remote setting would reduce the chance of the disease spreading. But already there are three separate locations covering 60km or more, and some of the victims were health- care workers, potentially “an amplification factor” for outbreaks, Salama said.

The local culture, with traditional healers and communal burials where there was close contact with the deceased, could cause “super-spreading” of Ebola, which kills up to 90% of sufferers, he said.

Salama said he hoped to get approval within days to use a vaccine developed by Merck in 2016. Although highly effective, it is still experimental, has not been licensed, and must be kept at -60°C to -80°C.

It required intensive contact tracing, which Salama said could take a week or two.

Salama said the WHO hoped to have a mobile laboratory operational at the weekend, and both the WHO and the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres already had a team on the ground – Reuters/African News Agency (ANA)