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Four new cases of Ebola have been confirmed in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, just a week after the country announced the
end of its ninth Ebola outbreak.

Congo’s Ministry of Health was notified Saturday of 26 cases of
fever “with hemorrhagic signs” that included 20 deaths in Beni,
a city in the northeast province of North Kivu. Of the six
samples analyzed for Ebola, four came back positive.

Ebola is considered endemic to Congo because of its equatorial
forest ecosystem. Authorities do not believe the new outbreak is
connected to the Bikoro outbreak, which infected 54 people and
killed 33 and which was just declared over. The two outbreaks
are separated by more than 2,500 kilometers (1,553 miles).

The Ministry of Health noted that therapeutic treatments are
still in country from the last outbreak, but the species of this
Ebola virus has yet to be determined. The Bikoro outbreak was
contained using an experimental vaccine, provided by Merck, to
target the Ebola Zaire strain. The World Health Organization
raised $36 million from a variety of countries and
nongovernmental organizations to fight that outbreak, and more
than 3,300 people were vaccinated.

North Kivu province, the site of the current outbreak, borders
Rwanda and Uganda. Beni has been the site of intense fighting in
recent decades, and between 2014 and 2016, more than 800 people
were killed in the area, many of them by machete. Allied
Democratic Forces, a Ugandan Islamist group, was blamed
alongside Congolese army officers for the killings.

The violence and unrest in Beni and the North Kivu province
presents a particular challenge for containing an Ebola
outbreak, Jeremy Konyndyk, who led parts of the 2014 Ebola
response for the Obama administration, told HuffPost in an
email. Konyndyk is now a senior policy fellow for the Washington-
based Center for Global Development.

“We have been lucky in recent Ebola outbreaks that they have
been in relatively safe and stable areas; North Kivu is a
different story,” he said, citing the “importance of baseline
operational security” in successfully controlling such an
situation. To properly trace the spread of an outbreak, he said,
disease detectives have to chase down people’s contacts, which
can be dangerous with the kind of militia activity seen in this
area of Congo.

In these more volatile situations, contacts are often harder to
find, as the population is more mobile and could be hiding from
militias ? making it harder for contact tracers to locate and
contain the outbreak.

Peter Salama, the WHO’s deputy director-general for emergency
preparedness and response, expressed similar concerns in a tweet
Wednesday.


Peter Salama
?
@PeteSalama
This cluster of #Ebola cases is occurring in an environment
which is very different from where we were operating in the
northwest of #DRC. It is an active conflict zone. The major
barrier will be safely accessing the affected population.

World Health Organization (WHO)
?
@WHO
The Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo #DRC ????
announced today that preliminary lab results indicate a cluster
of #Ebola cases in North Kivu province, some 2500 km from
Equateur province.

12:33 PM - Aug 1, 2018
72
118 people are talking about this
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Konyndyk did cite Congo’s previous experience battling Ebola,
and the WHO’s speedy reaction this spring, as reasons for
optimism. And Beni is not located on the Congo River, the
superhighway of central Africa, unlike the last Bikoro outbreak,
which authorities worried could spread across borders.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
?
@DrTedros
#Ebola is a constant threat in #DRC. We will fight this one as
we did the last. We have started moving staff and supplies to
the affected area, working with @MinSanteRDC and partners. https://twitter.com/who/status/1024712199816794112 …

World Health Organization (WHO)
?
@WHO
The Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo #DRC ????
announced today that preliminary lab results indicate a cluster
of #Ebola cases in North Kivu province, some 2500 km from
Equateur province.

11:08 AM - Aug 1, 2018
95
74 people are talking about this

A White House National Security Council spokesperson told
HuffPost that while every outbreak is concerning, the detection
of this one is a sign of a well-functioning disease surveillance
system.

“We are closely tracking the newly declared Ebola virus disease
outbreak in the DRC and stand ready to support the DRC and
international partners working to control it,” the spokesperson
said.

Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa,
said in a statement that the WHO has a “head start” on this
outbreak, as the staff and equipment are still in place from the
last one.

The comparatively isolated nature of Beni, and fact that the WHO
and others are already in country, is heartening to Dr. Cyrus
Shahpar, who previously served as the lead for the global rapid
response team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.

“We do have experienced people there, and it’s fairly remote
which usually limits the spread of these outbreaks,” said
Shahpar, who is now the director of preventing epidemics at
former CDC Director Tom Frieden’s Resolve to Save Lives
initiative.

But the fact that this is happening so close to the last
outbreak, and at a time when dangerous outbreaks are becoming
more common, is something that should give the world pause, he
said.

“It’s not a matter of if but when [with these types of
outbreaks],” Shahpar told HuffPost. “And the when seems to be
happening more and more.”

This story has been updated throughout.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ebola-democratic-republic- congo_us_5b61d252e4b0fd5c73d56d92
 

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