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An estimated 139 people have now died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ebola outbreak, with roughly 600 suspected cases logged so far.
Getting into it: In an announcement to the World Health Assembly in Geneva on Tuesday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic” and convened a meeting of the WHO’s Emergency Committee (a panel of international experts who advise the WHO chief) for later Tuesday, while noting that no WHO chief had ever declared a public health emergency before that committee had even met. “I did not do this lightly.”
DRC Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba gave the updated figures (up from the 80 deaths and 246 cases reported when the WHO first declared the emergency Sunday), though he flagged the toll as a rough estimate and said it’s not yet clear how many of those deaths Ebola actually caused. Of those suspected cases, 30 to 33 have now been laboratory-confirmed in the DRC, with two additional confirmed cases (including one death) across the border in Uganda’s capital Kampala.
Tedros laid out several specific factors driving the WHO’s alarm, including the appearance of cases in dense urban areas like Kampala and the rebel-held city of Goma, the deaths of healthcare workers (which indicates the virus is spreading inside medical facilities), the lack of any approved vaccine or treatment for the Bundibugyo strain behind the outbreak, and the massive population displacement in the conflict-ridden region. “Over 100,000 people have been newly displaced, and in Ebola outbreaks, you know what displacement means.”
As of now, the WHO has freed up $3.9 million in emergency funding and shipped 12 tons of supplies (with an additional 6 tons arriving Tuesday), and the DRC is expecting shipments of an experimental Ebola vaccine from the US and Britain that came out of Oxford.
This all comes as one of the most alarming aspects of the outbreak has been how long it spread undetected. According to the DRC, the outbreak’s first known victim died April 24 in Bunia, and the body was carried back home to Mongbwalu, a mining area, a move officials blame for letting things escalate. And once samples finally reached Kinshasa, the lab there only screened them against the far more common Zaire strain at first, which turned up nothing. It took until May 5 for word of around 50 deaths in Mongbwalu to even reach the WHO, and another nine days, May 14, before anyone confirmed it was actually Bundibugyo.
