Ebola outbreak threatens to become worst in history

The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with approximately 4,400 cases and more than 2,000 confirmed deaths so far, is advancing at a pace that could turn it into the worst outbreak in history, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on Wednesday, according to EFE.

“This is already the second-worst outbreak ever recorded and it is progressing faster than any previous outbreak. At the current pace, it could surpass the outbreak that affected West Africa between 2014 and 2016,” Tedros said at a press conference, a week after visiting the DRC to assess the response to the crisis.

The outbreak in the previous decade that he referred to caused around 28,000 infections and approximately 11,000 deaths, mainly affecting Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, CE Report quotes AGERPRES.

“The outbreak has a major advantage over us: it is still far ahead, and we are trying to catch up,” Tedros explained, stressing that one of the most worrying issues is the still high number of deaths occurring outside treatment centres and in areas where new contacts had not previously been identified.

“This shows us that there are chains of transmission that we do not know about, and until we identify them and break all of them, we will not be able to stop the outbreak,” the WHO director-general warned.

He stressed that contact tracing is one of the priorities, so that all suspected cases receive care and the target of identifying 95 percent of cases needed to interrupt transmission can be reached, while the current rate stands at only 80 percent.

“We also need to recruit and train three healthcare workers for every patient, meaning several thousand more than we currently have,” Tedros added.

As a positive development, he noted that two vaccines specifically designed against the Bundibugyo variant of the Ebola virus, which is responsible for the current outbreak, are in Phase 1 human clinical trials and “have proven to be safe,” although their development could take several more months.

Animal studies have also provided indications that the Ervebo vaccine against the Zaire variant, which is better known than Bundibugyo because it has caused several outbreaks in the past, could be effective in the current outbreak. Therefore, the WHO recommended last week that human clinical trials begin as soon as possible.

Photo: WHO