Ebola in DR Congo reaches 9,765 cases and 4,727 deaths as the WHO warns against easing the response

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has now caused 9,765 recorded cases and 4,727 deaths, United Nations agencies said on Friday 23 October, as the disease reached a new province in the north-west of the country and Kenya prepared to release the first contacts from quarantine.

The figures were presented to journalists in Geneva by Dr. Catherine Smallwood, the World Health Organization’s incident manager in the DRC, who spoke from the eastern city of Bunia, and by the World Food Programme’s country representative David Stevenson, according to UN News. The outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, was officially declared in mid-May and started in the volatile east of the country. It has since spread to eight provinces, the latest being Nord-Ubangi in the north-west.

Thousands of contacts under watch

Health teams are monitoring about 30,000 contacts every day over a three-week follow-up period. Smallwood warned against easing the response: “If we lift the foot off the pedal, the virus will resurge very quickly, will continue to spread to newly affected areas and pose a threat for the country, the region and the world at large,” she said.

The WHO official described an epidemic moving into ever more remote places, some of which take days to reach by boat or motorcycle and cannot be reached by car or plane. The crisis is unfolding amid conflict, hunger and displacement, which the WFP’s Stevenson summed up as “a crisis on top of a crisis”. The agency is feeding affected families and building Ebola treatment centres.

Signs of progress, and a warning

Smallwood pointed to several encouraging developments. The number of people dying in the community or outside treatment centres, a marker of cases detected too late, fell over the past week, which she said suggests that efforts to find cases early and refer them quickly are working. More than 2,000 beds are now available against a WHO target of 3,000, care in treatment centres has improved significantly, and 2,600 people in the DRC have survived the disease.

A serious gap remains. In parts of eastern DRC, patients visit between two and five different health facilities before they reach an Ebola treatment centre, which Smallwood called “a really, really big challenge”.

Kenya: contacts leave quarantine

Cases have also been confirmed outside the DRC. A smaller outbreak in Uganda was declared over in August, and cases have been confirmed in Kenya, Nigeria and France, according to the UN report. In Kenya, a man who had worked in the DRC and flew home to Nairobi via Uganda became the country’s first case and fatality earlier this month. More than 100 contacts were identified, and some of them complete their 21-day quarantine on Sunday and return home.

The WHO representative in Kenya, Dr. Neema Rusibamayila Kimambo, said their sacrifice had helped ensure “that we don’t have community spread today”. She urged that those released should not be stigmatised, since leaving quarantine only means they had contact with a patient, not that they had Ebola. “Africa is very interconnected and nobody is safe until everyone is safe,” she said, adding that preparedness is the key message for governments.

Background

Geopolitiki reported on the previous stage of the outbreak the day before: Nigeria confirms first Ebola case as WHO tracks 44 contacts and the Congo outbreak spreads to an eighth province. The case and death totals above are those quoted by the UN agencies; they are counts reported to the WHO and may be revised as laboratory confirmation and contact tracing continue.