WHO worried about 'scale and speed' of deadly Ebola outbreak

“The World Health Organization chief voiced concern on Tuesday about the 'scale and speed' of an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo which has killed an estimated 131 people. The WHO has declared the surge of the highly contagious haemorrhagic fever an international health emergency and will hold an emergency meeting on the crisis on Tuesday. No vaccine or therapeutic treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola responsible for the latest outbreak of the disease, which has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the past half century.With the new outbreak largely concentrated in difficult-to-access areas, few samples have been laboratory-tested and figures are based mostly on suspected cases. 'We have recorded roughly 131 deaths in total and we have around 513 suspected cases,' Congolese Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba said on national television early Tuesday.'The deaths we are reporting are all the deaths we have identified in the community, without necessarily saying that they are all linked to Ebola,' he added. The previous figures from the outbreak, declared late last week in the country's east, gave a total of 91 dead out of 350 suspected cases.WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the decision to declare the second-highest level of alert under international health regulations was not taken 'lightly'. 'I'm deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic,' he told the World Health Assembly in Geneva on Tuesday.The outbreak's epicentre is in northeastern Ituri province on the border with Uganda and South Sudan. The United States has announced it was bolstering precautions to prevent the spread of Ebola, including screening air passengers from outbreak-hit areas and temporarily suspending visa services.It is attempting to evacuate six additional people to monitor their health, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Monday. First identified in 1976 and believed to have originated in bats, Ebola is a deadly viral disease spread through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can cause severe bleeding and organ failure. The outbreak is the 17th in the central African country of more than 100 million people. The deadliest Ebola outbreak in the DRC claimed nearly 2,300 lives out of 3,500 cases between 2018 and 2020. The previous outbreak before the current one killed 45 people between September and December last year, the WHO said.

Summary generated from the RSS feed of Gulf Times Education. All article rights belong to the original publisher. Click through to read the full piece on www.gulf-times.com/community/education.