Suspected or confirmed cases now number more than 900, with around 220 deaths
The World Health Organization (WHO) called this Wednesday for an “immediate ceasefire” by all parties to the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo) to try to contain the Ebola epidemic.
Suspected or confirmed cases of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo) – which borders Angola – total more than 900, with around 220 deaths, according to the WHO.
“We cannot build trust in communities nor isolate patients while bombs fall,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on his official account on the social network
Tedros called on the army and militias to allow safe and sustained access for medical teams in the affected areas, mainly in the provinces of Ituri, South Kivu and North Kivu, and that “human survival be prioritized above anything else.”
The WHO director-general recalled that clashes in the area – where militias such as the rebels of the March 23 Movement (M23) armed group, allegedly supported, according to DRCongo, by neighboring Rwanda, or the Islamist Allied Democratic Forces – are causing massive displacements, with the risk that people who have been in contact with Ebola patients will end up in overcrowded camps.
Violence can also complicate containment measures, and attacks on health facilities “make it almost impossible to trace cases and their contacts”, lamented the head of the WHO.
All of this leaves eastern DRCongo “facing a catastrophic collision between disease and conflict”, while the Ebola outbreak “advances faster than the health response”, he admitted.
DRCongo, a neighboring nation of Angola, is regularly affected by outbreaks and epidemics of the Ebola virus, which is transmitted through direct contact with blood or other bodily fluids from infected people or animals and causes severe hemorrhagic fever, muscle pain, weakness, headaches, throat irritation, fever, vomiting, diarrhea and internal bleeding.
The current epidemic corresponds to a new strain of Ebola, whose virus belongs to the Ebola Bundibugyo variant, for which there are no specific treatments or vaccines and with a fatality rate that varies between 30% and 50%, according to the WHO.
In this sense, it is less lethal than the better-known Ebola Zaire variant, with mortality rates between 60% and 90% in previous outbreaks, and for which there are vaccines and treatments.
Ebola causes a deadly hemorrhagic fever, but the virus, which has caused more than 15,000 deaths in Africa in the last 50 years, is less contagious than Covid-19 or measles.
In the absence of a vaccine and approved treatment against the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, responsible for the current epidemic, containment guidelines are essentially based on compliance with health prevention measures and the rapid detection of cases.
