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WASHINGTON—The Trump administration regards the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo as too dangerous to reinstate U.S. medical personnel to treat Ebola patients there, officials said Wednesday.
Armed conflict between rebels and government troops has displaced nearly a million people in the central African nation. While American officials are advising the DRC government, the U.S. has pulled Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts who specialize in treating the deadly virus from remote areas to safer cities.
CDC Director Robert Redfield had said that CDC medical workers should have stayed in the outbreak zone, but Trump administration officials overrode that decision in the wake of several bursts of violence.
The World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders still maintain a presence in the country. The current outbreak, in the North Kivu and Ituri provinces, is the 10th in the country since the discovery of the virus there in 1976 near the Ebola River.
The ninth transpired 780 miles away in the country’s Equateur province and was declared at an end in late July.
International public-health officials say the CDC’s presence in the outbreak zone would be immensely helpful, because its contingent includes the most experienced Ebola epidemiologists in the world.
At least 300 cases and more than 170 deaths have been reported in the area thus far, CDC said. But U.S. officials, in a conference call with reporters Wednesday, said firefights have broken out in that area as recently as last weekend.
The region has seen considerable violence, and in that setting health-care workers are struggling to combat the deadly virus. Ebola causes fever, diarrhea, vomiting and internal bleeding and can be spread by bodily fluids, including from corpses. The death rate varies from village to village, but generally has hovered around 50%.
Health-care workers struggle to convince the local population to abandon traditional burial practices to prevent further infection.
The outbreak still is relatively small and remote compared with the 2014-15 epidemic in the West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. That outbreak, the largest ever recorded, struck major population zones such as Monrovia, Liberia, and Conakry, Guinea. The overall epidemic spread to encompass nearly 29,000 cases and 11,300 deaths, according to CDC.
That earlier outbreak caused isolated cases in the U.S. and Europe, primarily among health-care workers and others diagnosed after flying out from Africa. As a consequence, one priority of U.S. officials is to prevent the spread of the disease into neighboring countries, such as Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and South Sudan.
In recent months, DRC villagers have burned down a medical center, and a team giving vaccinations was assaulted.
“Attacks are occurring and continuing to occur,” said one senior U.S. official. “The security situation is not improving.”
The very fact that there are vaccines to give is a striking advance since the West Africa outbreak. Medical trials have shown strong evidence for the efficacy of a vaccine from
Merck & Co. Inc.,
which has begun the process of seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The U.S. National Institutes of Health, working with medical officials and doctors of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s health ministry, also is planning to test other vaccines and treatments.
U.S. officials estimated that about 29,000 doses of the Merck vaccine have already been given in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The strategy has been to administer vaccinations to people in contact with Ebola patients and to the contacts of those people.
Write to Thomas M. Burton at [email protected]
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