WHO chief visits worst-hit area as Ebola spread reaches alarming levels
"We are here to discuss with the community, to see how the response is running and if there are challenges to help," he said.
As Ebola tears through eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the head of the World Health Organization is urging the world not to look away. Arriving in the outbreak’s epicentre, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appealed for stronger international backing as authorities race to contain a virus spreading through one of the country’s most fragile regions.
Speaking to reporters in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province, the WHO director general said the international community was already assisting the DRC government in its response to the outbreak.
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Still, he said outside support alone would not be enough. The fight, he added, also depends on “community ownership” — from countering “mistrust” and misinformation to securing more financial help from other countries.
“We are here to discuss with the community, to see how the response is running and if there are challenges to help,” he said.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Bunia
The highly contagious haemorrhagic fever has already been detected in three eastern DRC provinces and has crossed into neighbouring Uganda.
Since the outbreak was declared on 15 May, there have been at least 1,077 suspected Ebola cases in the DRC, including 246 deaths, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday. Uganda has recorded nine confirmed infections, including one death.
The WHO has warned that the real scale of the outbreak in the DRC is likely far greater, saying the virus may have been circulating before it was officially identified.
That danger is compounded by the country’s weak health infrastructure. In the vast and impoverished central African nation — where the mineral-rich east has endured three decades of conflict — laboratory capacity remains too limited to confirm cases quickly and widely.
Uganda this week shut its border with the DRC and imposed a 21-day quarantine on anyone arriving from across the frontier.
Health workers wearing protective equipment are disinfected after leaving an isolation area at a hospital in Mongbwalu
On Friday, the WHO said one patient had recovered on Wednesday, left hospital and returned to the community after testing negative twice. Anais Legand of the WHO described the case as a “first” among patients confirmed to have Ebola in the current outbreak.
Ebola spreads through close contact and bodily fluids and has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa over the past 50 years.
The DRC’s deadliest recorded outbreak, between 2018 and 2020, claimed nearly 2,300 lives from 3,500 cases.
Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said the latest emergency had reached an unprecedented pace, warning that “never has an Ebola epidemic recorded so many cases in the first days after it being declared”.
It said the region had not received enough specialist medical personnel.
“Two weeks after the declaration of the Ebola disease outbreak in Ituri Province, the situation is deeply alarming and a legitimate source of anxiety for communities and frontline health workers alike,” it said.
In Ituri province, where state services are largely absent, the response is also being hampered by insecurity linked to armed groups and militias.
“There is experience in this country and under the government’s leadership, and especially with community ownership, we can stop it,” said Dr Tedros.
“These are the ingredients which are important, of course, with the support from the international community as well. So the issue is in our hands.
“If we do our best, it can be stopped,” he added.
There is no vaccine or specific treatment for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola responsible for the current outbreak.
But the head of the CDC Africa said on Thursday that a vaccine should be ready by the end of the year.
Read more: WHO announces first confirmed Ebola recovery in DRC outbreak
The WHO said its specialists had reviewed several possible vaccines that were “promising enough” to move forward into clinical trials.
“In the meantime, our priority is to stop transmission with tools that we have used for decades of Ebola responses, which include disease surveillance, rapid testing and diagnosis, contact tracing, isolation and care for patients, infection prevention and control, community engagement, and safe and dignified burials,” it added in a statement.
North and South Kivu provinces, which have also registered Ebola cases in the outbreak, have been scarred by almost uninterrupted violence for three decades.
Large parts of the affected areas are under the control of the Rwanda-backed armed group M23, which has been fighting government forces.
Millions of people have fled the violence and are now living in displacement camps where hygiene conditions are poor.
Nearly a million of those displaced are in Ituri province, heightening fears that the epidemic could rip through the camps.
