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Militant attacks on health-care personnel and members of the Congolese army have made a global response to a growing outbreak of Ebola virus in two eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Global Beni, a regional trading hub in North Kivu Province. Health officials responding to the epidemic have been forced to break their deadly blood pressure.
"This is probably the most complex context in the history of Ebola outbreak before," Peter Salama, deputy director-general for emergency preparedness and response at the World Health Organization, told The Hill in an interview. "The security situation is indeed tense and it has been there for many, many years."
The violence and instability, in a region where a million people, American responders out of the region. Several American personnel were pulled from Beni and surrounding areas after an August attack on a Congolese military base.
A Disaster Assistance Response Team, led by staff of the CDC and the US Agency for International Development, has been dispatched to Kinshasa, more than a thousand miles from the outbreak epicenter. Senior American officials said Wednesday that 10 to 15 of the United States are providing support in the United States.
Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan, monitoring border crossings in hopes of preventing the virus' s spread across international borders. CDC has deployed 94 Americans to those countries and to Geneva, where the WHO is headquartered, to help with the response.
The Congolese Ministry of Health said Wednesday that 339 cases of the Ebola virus have been identified, making the disease worse in the nation's history. Two hundred and twelve people have died.
About half of the cases have come to Beni, a city of about a million residents near the border with Uganda. Ten cases also occurred in Butembo, a larger city south of the border.
Salama said many of the cases are spreading through interactions at private health-care facilities, which do not register with the local government and do not exist. There are several hundred such facilities in Beni alone, some of which are located in private residences.
"The majority of transmissions, we believe, is happening in private health facilities," Salama said.
Salama said.
In a conference call on Wednesday, senior American officials would not rule out deploying US military personnel to the region, where security is ostensibly the responsibility of the United Nations Organization Stabilizing Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or MONUSCO.
But deploying American troops, like the nearly 3,000 sentenced to Ebola outbreak in 2014, is highly unlikely. The Americans feel Liberia operated in a support capacity, rather than for security, and America has much closer ties to Liberia, a country it helped found in the 19th Century, than it does to the DRC.
Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, suggested at a conference on Capitol Hill that the outbreak could have caused the Ebola virus to become entrenched within the Congo River Basin for years to come. Redfield later said that it was giving voice to a worst-case scenario, rather than suggesting the outbreak would spin out of control.
"We do not believe that the Ebola outbreak is currently not containable. In fact, it has been contained, "Salama said. "We believe it is containable, but it is related to scaling up at high intensity."
A new vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health and produced by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, has been deployed for just the third time in the North Kivu region. The vaccine has been given to more than 29,500 people, mostly those who have come into contact with someone infected with Ebola virus.
"This outbreak is going to take many weeks to contain, so we need to be in it for the medium term," Salama said.
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