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The risk of Ebola escaping from the Democratic Republic of Congo is now "very high" and the epidemic is already approaching Uganda, said Thursday the World Health Organization.
W.H.O. has raised its official level of alert because of the violence on the part of the local authorities. militia, which has slowed down efforts to contain the epidemic and population movements in eastern Congo, where the last outbreak erupted in August.
But the risk of spreading Ebola on a global scale remains low, the agency said.
Since 2000, Uganda has experienced three outbreaks of Ebola, with a total of about 600 cases. Although it is a poor country, its health system is relatively well organized and its health ministry has said it will launch a case detection campaign.
In Congo, the response to the epidemic has been hampered by fighting and the small number of victims who leave or refuse to go to treatment centers, spreading the virus to new areas.
In addition, local politicians exploiting fear and confusion before the December elections have encouraged people to be wary of the national government's efforts, said Dr. Peter Salama, head of W.H.'s emergency response. a press conference in Geneva, Reuters reported.
In the coming weeks, problems like these could "create a perfect storm," said Dr. Salama.
As of Friday, there were 155 confirmed or probable cases in the Ebola outbreak. Some 102 patients died and 45 cured patients were released.
In a video statement, Congolese Minister of Health Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga said the epidemic was now three times larger than this summer in central Equateur province. He blamed several factors.
More people live in the affected area and are more mobile because they are mostly traders rather than farmers. The region has better roads and better water links, but it is more dangerous because many militias operate there.
Nearly 12,000 health workers and contacts of known victims have been vaccinated.
Although Ebola cases continued to decline and only about 10 new cases were detected each week, the W.H.O. is worried that we first came to Tshomia, a fishing village across from Lake Uganda from Uganda.
Refugees often flee across the lake; this year, 75,000 Congolese have crossed into Uganda to escape fighting in Ituri province, of which Tshomia is part, according to a report from the European Commission's humanitarian aid organization.
Officials in Ituri said the case was a woman who had attended the funeral of an early Ebola victim in Beni, where the current outbreak began.
She was followed as a contact person, but she refused to be vaccinated, slipped between visits by medical workers and traveled about 75 miles north before falling ill. She visited a traditional healer and a rural clinic before dying at the Tshomia Regional Hospital on September 20th.
More than 100 people in contact with her are now vaccinated, and the local clinic at the mud she's visited had to be decontaminated.
Although health workers were not targeted, 21 people were killed last week in Beni. An Islamic fundamentalist militia known as the Allied Democratic Forces has been charged. The group has a history of cross-border fighting with the Ugandan army, attacks on UN peacekeepers and killings of civilians.
After the murders, the medical staff was asked to stop working for 48 hours; their subsequent efforts were hampered by a four-day mourning period declared by local officials, W.H.O. I said.
Many rumors about Ebola are circulating and need to be debunked, according to the Ministry of Health's Twitter feed. In particular, they reported that prisoners with Ebola had escaped from Beni prison, that children had been vaccinated without their parents' consent and that schoolgirls who had had their period had been forced into treatment centers.
Four Ebola treatment centers were built and a treatment team arrived in Tshomia.
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