India Reviews Ebola Preparedness Amid African Outbreak

NEW DELHI: Union health minister Jagat Prakash Nadda on Monday reviewed India’s preparedness and response measures for Ebola Virus Disease in view of the recent outbreaks reported in parts of Africa, even as the World Health Organization warned that the epidemic was “outpacing” response efforts. However, the health ministry said that no case of Ebola has been reported in India so far. The review meeting was attended by the health secretary, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), director general of health services (DGHS), additional secretary (public health), director of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and other senior ministry officials, news agency ANI reported. This comes as WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday that 220 suspected deaths had been reported in the ongoing outbreak and warned that delays in detecting infections had hampered containment efforts. “We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us,” Tedros said, urging countries bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicentre of the outbreak, to take immediate action. Tedros said he would travel to Congo on Tuesday and noted that tackling the fast-moving outbreak was particularly difficult because Ituri and North Kivu provinces remained highly insecure and there were no approved vaccines for the Bundibugyo strain. Earlier in the day, Uganda reported two more Ebola cases in the capital Kampala, taking its total number of confirmed infections to seven. Meanwhile, over 900 suspected infections have been reported so far in Congo, Uganda’s neighbour and the epicentre of the current outbreak, AFP reported. The WHO has declared the outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola a public health emergency of international concern, while the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has classified it as a public health emergency of continental security (PHECS).