WHO raises Ebola risk in DRC to 'very high' as outbreak spreads

The World Health Organization (WHO) has upgraded the public health risk of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from high to “very high” as the deadly outbreak continues to spread.

WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced on Friday that they were revising their risk assessment for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, to “very high at the national level, high at the regional level, and low at global level.”

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Tedros also said on X that the situation in the DRC was “deeply worrisome”.

“So far, 82 cases have been confirmed, with seven confirmed deaths. But we know the epidemic in the DRC is much larger. There are now almost 750 suspected cases and 177 suspected deaths,” he wrote.

He added that additional WHO personnel had been deployed to the epicentre of the DRC’s outbreak in Ituri province, to support affected communities.

The new strain of the virus currently has no approved vaccine or treatment, and the WHO declared it an emergency of international concern on Sunday.

Ebola is an often-fatal virus that causes fever, body aches, vomiting and diarrhoea. It spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids.

Public health measures

Reporting from the eastern Congolese city of Goma, in neighbouring North Kivu province, Al Jazeera’s Alain Uaykani said authorities are taking “serious measures” against the outbreak as the situation escalates.

In an official order on Friday, Ituri’s provincial government restricted funerals, saying burials must now be conducted only by specialised teams and prohibited the transport of dead bodies by non-medical vehicles.

It also limited public gatherings to a maximum of 50 people and suspended the local football league.

This came a day after residents in Ituri province’s Rwampara town torched an Ebola treatment centre and clashed with police ⁠while trying to recover the body of a victim.

“The way things are going in Ituri, they are fearing that more cases are spreading because the majority of the cases reported across the region are still coming from Ituri,” Uaykani said.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said on Friday that volunteers are going door-to-door in the area at the centre of ⁠the outbreak, to combat misinformation about Ebola and explain how people can protect themselves and seek care.

“Community reactions remain mixed. For some people the outbreak is very real and they are taking information on ‌how to protect themselves,” Gabriela Arenas, the Regional Operations Coordinator for the IFRC Africa Region, told reporters via video link from Nairobi. “For others, there’s still suspicion and misinformation claiming that Ebola is fabricated.”

At the same time, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) incident manager for its Ebola response team said that the US is “actively engaged” in efforts to find therapeutics for the Bundibugyo strain.

“We are rapidly evaluating the landscape of products that are available, determining what products may be the most appropriate, and determining the best way that we can ensure the safe and effective delivery of therapeutics in the appropriate way to assess their efficacy,” Dr Satish Pillai said in a briefing on Friday.

Pillai added that the US has the capacity to test for Ebola because of its integrated laboratory network, which is supported by the CDC.

‘Mistake’ to underestimate Ebola

The world should not underestimate the risk posed by this ⁠Ebola outbreak, Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the ⁠WHO regional director for Africa, told the Reuters news agency on Friday.

“It would be a big mistake to underestimate it, especially with a virus with this strain, Bundibugyo, [for] which we don’t have the vaccine,” Janabi said, adding that the outbreak in DRC has had relatively little global attention compared with this month’s hantavirus outbreak, which affected cruise ship passengers from 23 countries, including wealthy Western nations.

“You just need one contact case to put all of us at risk, so my wish and prayer is that we should give [Ebola] the ⁠attention it deserves,” he said.

Moreover, the WHO director of health emergency alert and response operations, Abdirahman Mahamud, also said on Friday that the potential for this virus to spread rapidly was “high, very high, and that changed the whole dynamic”.

The strain of Ebola was also documented in Uganda, but Tedros said that the situation there was “currently stable”, after one death linked to a case from DRC was reported.

Tedros added that a US national who was working in the DRC has tested positive for Ebola and was transferred to Germany for care, and there was “another American national, who is a high-risk contact, who has been transferred to the Czech Republic”.

The Radboud University Hospital in the Netherlands also announced on Friday it had admitted a patient with a “low suspicion” of Ebola, adding that the patient was placed in a specialised isolation unit for observation, testing and treatment.