The second largest Ebola outbreak in the world exceeds 3000 cases

The second Ebola outbreak, the deadliest and deadliest in history, has exceeded 3,000 cases and 2,000 deaths while the epidemic continues throughout the year , despite access to an experimental vaccine and developmental treatments.

A total of 3,004 people have reported hemorrhagic fever symptoms in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo since August 1 last year, according to Congolese health officials, and 2,899 of these People have been tested positive for the Ebola virus, which is transmitted through contact with the blood or secretions of an infected person and causes a type of often fatal haemorrhagic fever.

So far, there have been 2,006 deaths, including 1,901 deaths due to confirmed cases of Ebola. Other deaths are considered probable cases. According to Congolese health authorities, just over 900 people with the virus have recovered to date.

This dark step comes a month after the World Health Organization (WHO), the world's health arm of the United Nations, said the ongoing epidemic was an international emergency. The WHO director general described the epidemic as being more complex than the more deadly epidemic of 2014-2016 in West Africa due to political instability and the security in the region, attacks against health staff, a highly mobile population, mistrust and misinformation of the community.

Hugh Kinsella Cunningham / EPA via Shutterstock

This is the 10th Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the worst since 1976, when scientists discovered the virus near the eponymous Ebola River. It is also one of the worst in the world, after the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in several West African countries, which infected 28,652 people and killed 11,325 people, according to data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The current epidemic is now expanding to three provinces in eastern Congo, which share international borders with South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

On Thursday, the Ugandan Ministry of Health said that a 9-year-old Congolese girl with Ebola crossed the border into Uganda from the Democratic Republic of Congo with her mother for treatment. The child was placed in isolation in an Ebola treatment center in a nearby Ugandan town in preparation for cross-border cases, according to the Ministry of Health.

Although the average number of new cases reported per week in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has declined slightly in recent weeks, the number of affected areas has increased.

Cases have been identified in new geographical areas in recent weeks, although the epicenter of the epidemic is in North Kivu province, where conflict and limited infrastructure hampered the response.

A technical committee in charge of the Ebola response, reporting directly to the Congolese president, organized two days of training this week with health workers in Kinshasa, in the country's capital, to help prevent the spread of the virus in the city. and prepare the response by building the capacity of the city. control points of entry. There is currently no suspicious case of Ebola in Kinshasa, which lies about 1700 km west of the epicenter of the epidemic, according to a press release published Thursday by the commission.

Jérôme Delay / AP, FILE

Dr. Benoit Kebela, a Congolese epidemiologist on the committee, said the only effective weapon to stop the spread of the virus was community participation.

"It's the property of the community that will stop this 10th outbreak," Kebela said in a statement Thursday. "In the city of Kinshasa, there are community leaders such as street leaders, localities, neighborhoods, communities and the whole community with whom we can end this epidemic."

Bob Kitchen, vice president for emergencies at the International Rescue Committee, one of the field aid groups assisting Congolese health officials, told ABC News Thursday that many people in the United States affected areas were "afraid to seek treatment for diseases". they will be sent to an Ebola treatment center where they are afraid of contracting the disease. "

The "lack of acceptance from the community" remains the main obstacle to controlling the outbreak, said Kitchen.

"Building trust with the community does not just mean talking to the affected population," he added. "It means working with the community to tailor the response and address the general needs it faces both inside and outside the Ebola outbreak."

The Associated Press

An experimental vaccine against the Ebola virus developed by the US pharmaceutical group Merck and developed during the outbreak in West Africa has been approved for use in the Democratic Republic of Congo a week after the outbreak of the outbreak last year. More than 206,000 people in the area affected by the current outbreak have received the experimental vaccine since August 8, 2018, according to Congolese health authorities.

Meanwhile, two of the four experimental treatments tested during the outbreak are now being offered to all patients after showing that they could save lives. Preliminary results from a randomized controlled trial that began last November in four Ebola treatment centers in North Kivu indicate that patients receiving one of two antibody-based treatments, called REGN-EB3 and mAb114, were more likely to survive than those receiving two treatments. other experimental drugs, called ZMapp and remdesivir.

After a meeting to review the initial results, an independent monitoring committee recommended that all future patients be offered REGN-EB3 or mAb114, while the other two treatments would be discontinued.

"From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable," told reporters Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director general of the National Institute of Biomedical Research of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), who co-sponsored the clinical study a telephone briefing earlier this month.

But the epidemic is still not under control. Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a medical association that cares for Ebola patients in collaboration with the Congolese authorities, has declared "extremely concerned about the lack of visibility on the current epidemiological situation", because many of the Ebola deaths have been reported in people rather than in treatment centers in recent weeks.

"Many people have died of Ebola in their communities before they could be identified, diagnosed and admitted for the treatment of the disease," MSF said in a statement. "About one third of Ebola-related deaths have been diagnosed only post-mortem, which clearly indicates that the epidemic response fails in the identification and research of people potentially prone to Ebola."