A new outbreak of the highly contagious and deadly Ebola virus is sweeping across parts of Congo, African health officials have warned, adding they’re concerned about further spread due to frequent travel in the area and difficulties with contract tracing in the remote region.
Health workers wearing protective suits tend to an Ebola victim kept in an isolation tent in Beni, Congo, July 13, 2019.
Associated Press
The outbreak has sickened 246 people and killed 65 so far, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and preliminary lab results have reportedly detected Ebola in 13 of 20 samples tested.
The Africa CDC said it will convene an urgent meeting with health authorities from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and South Sudan, it said as well as United Nations representatives, to discuss containment of the outbreak.
A statement from the agency expressed concern that the outbreak could spark rapid spread of the virus, due to instability and poor resources in the impacted areas, and general control challenges, like difficulty tracing potential exposures.
Congo has seen more than a dozen Ebola outbreaks in the last decade, the most recent of which was declared over in December after killing more than 40 dozen people. The U.S. has long played a significant role in helping countries respond to Ebola outbreaks by providing expert advice and money for control efforts. That help has traditionally come from USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was largely dismantled under Trump. Billionaire Elon Musk, who led the Department of Government Efficiency in making billions in dollars of cuts to the government, said the agency "very briefly" suspended its Ebola prevention efforts before realizing and reversing the mistake, but public health experts have said the original funding has not been fully restored. Money was not available to support testing and port screenings in Uganda when an outbreak was declared last January, one expert told NPR, and another said a majority of USAID's high-risk outbreak specialists were pushed out of the agency and not re-hired. The American CDC has had an office in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2002, and the agency said it deployed workers to educate on community prevention and protection during Congo's outbreak last fall.
Ebola disease is caused by an infection with an orthoebolavirus, a group of viruses found primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and discovered in Democratic Republic of the Congo. Those viruses carry a mortality rate as high as 80 to 90 percent, according to the CDC. It can take between two and 21 days after contact with the virus for an infected person to show symptoms, which include fever, aches, pains, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting and unexplained bleeding. Ebola is spread primarily through contact with the body fluids of an infected person, or occasionally through contact with an infected animal.
Ebola is treated primarily through supportive care like IV fluids and medicine for blood pressure, vomiting, diarrhea, fever and pain. There are two FDA-approved treatments for Eloba, but only for the disease caused by one specific strain of orthoebolavirus (Zaire). There is an FDA-approved vaccine for the prevention of Ebola, but it can be hard to distribute the vaccine in vast countries like Congo due to limited access and scarce funds, both of which were cited by the World Health Organization as challenges during Congo’s last outbreak.
There were 11 American cases of Ebola during the global outbreak in 2014, nine of which were in people who contracted the disease outside of the country and traveled into the U.S. The other two were nurses who were infected on U.S. soil after treating a patient in Dallas. They both survived.
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