The worst fears of World Health Organization (W.H.O.) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have been realized. The career Ethiopian bureaucrat confirmed late Monday the Ebola outbreak is outpacing response efforts in Africa and countries neighbouring the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are at high risk from the disease.
“We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us,” Tedros declared as he urged neighbouring countries to take immediate action.
Addressing an online meeting of the African Union about the outbreak, the Guardian reports he also announced there had been 220 suspected deaths so far in the current Ebola outbreak and he would travel to the DRC on Tuesday with Chikwe Ihekweazu, executive director of W.H.O.’s health emergencies programme.
Tedros’s announcement came as attacks by residents on health facilities in Ituri province, the centre of the outbreak, hampered the response.
Earlier this month, Tedros declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” after more than 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths were reported in the DRC and two deaths in neighbouring Uganda, as Breitbart News reported.
On Monday, Uganda announced two more Ebola cases, taking the total number of confirmed cases in the country to seven. The new cases are both Ugandan health workers in a private health facility in the capital, Kampala, the country’s health ministry said in a statement.
News of the fast spread of the virus comes after it was announced a vaccine based on the same technology that delivered the AstraZeneca Covid-19 jab is being urgently developed by British scientists to help contain the deadly sub-strain enveloping the DRC and its neighbors, as Breitbart News reported.
Ebola was first discovered in 1976 in what is now DR Congo, and is thought to have spread from bats.
It is a rare, highly contagious and often fatal disease generally transmitted via bodily fluids.
Symptoms include a high temperature, extreme tiredness, vomiting, diarrhoea, muscle pain and bleeding.