Congos

Health workers struggle as new Ebola cases are found in border regions of South Ubangi and Haut-Uele.

The Ebola virus caused by the Bundibugyo strain has spread to two new health zones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

New cases were found in Bulu in South Ubangi governorate on the border with the Central African Republic and Dungu in Haut-Uele province on the border with South Sudan, the WHO said on Friday.

The additional cases bring the number of health zones affected to 63 across seven provinces as authorities struggle to control the outbreak.

As of September 23, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, has reported 7,890 confirmed cases and 3,799 deaths, according to the WHO. That means that almost half the people who contracted the infection have died.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said conflict and population displacement were making it more difficult for health workers to reach ‌‌affected communities and trace people who may have been exposed to the virus.

“It’s very difficult to see Ebola in isolation because even our response to Ebola is affected by the conflict, because there is displacement and there is an access problem to some areas,” Tedros said.

The Bundibugyo strain is difficult to treat because there are no approved vaccines, Tedros said, adding that the WHO is accelerating clinical trials of vaccines and treatments.

Contact tracing falling short

Meanwhile, health workers looking for people who may have been exposed to the Bundibugyo strain are falling short of their targets.

According to Dr Jean Kaseya, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the more than 7,000 confirmed cases should translate to about 420,000 contacts.

“But currently, we have just 30,000 people in the contact list,” Kaseya said.

“When the outbreak is at community level, we cannot talk about control,” he added.

Ituri province in northeastern DRC continues to be the epicentre of the outbreak, accounting for 6,032 confirmed cases since the start of the epidemic in May, including 868 new confirmed cases reported in the last 21 days.

North Kivu is the second most affected province, with 1,480 new cases, including 567 reported in the last 21 days. The province now accounts for around a third of newly confirmed cases and deaths, the WHO said in a report on Sunday.

Nearly 60 percent of people diagnosed in North Kivu died, significantly higher than the national average of 48 percent, the data show.

Medical staff say patients are avoiding health facilities until it is too late.

“Patients think that if they arrive at the hospital, they will be immediately sent to the treatment centre to die,” said Dr Michel Paluku Mukuloli, who works at a hospital in North Kivu’s Butembo.

That complicates efforts to identify cases and start treatment before the disease reaches its most dangerous stages.

North Kivu was the epicentre of three previous Ebola outbreaks, including one in 2018-2020, which until this year was the DRC’s largest and deadliest. Those outbreaks, however, were caused by a different type of Ebola virus, known as the Zaire strain.

Much less is known about the Bundibugyo strain. But responders say in the early stages of infection, patients often experience milder symptoms easily mistaken for more common diseases such as malaria and typhoid fever.

DRC detected the outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo virus in mid-May; nearly 3,400 people have since died.

More than 7,000 Ebola cases have been recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) worst outbreak of the deadly disease, according to figures from Congolese authorities.

The DRC officially detected the latest outbreak in mid-May, but experts suspect it had been spreading under the radar for weeks before.

Of the 7,022 registered cases, 3,398 people have died, according to DRC authorities. Currently, 837 people are in isolation or receiving treatment.

The outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo virus, DRC’s 17th Ebola epidemic, began in the northeastern Ituri province.

It has since spread across conflict-plagued, remote eastern and northern regions where armed groups have roamed for decades, the presence of the state is weak and health infrastructure is largely lacking.

Earlier this week, one case of the disease was confirmed in a seventh province, South-Ubangi, which is in the northwest of the country bordering the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville.

Most of the recorded cases remain in Ituri, where Ebola has been detected in schools in the days after the post-summer holiday return to classes, causing alarm among parents and health workers.

“We are very worried because we don’t know which child comes from which family or what the health status of the members of that family is,” Angele Magani, a mother of a schoolboy in Bunia, Ituri’s provincial capital, told the AFP news agency.

“We are so scared, even though the school authorities reassure us about the health measures that have been put in place,” she added.

Bunia school official Roger Mungimbo told AFP that “there is a mandatory hand-washing system with soap, and we have also done everything possible to have a maximum of 30 pupils per classroom”.

“We regularly make the children aware that they must not touch each other, must not greet each other and must wash their hands regularly,” he added.

Ebola, which has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa over the last 50 years, is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids and can cause severe internal and external bleeding and organ failure.

The world’s deadliest outbreak in West Africa in 2014-2016 was the Zaire Ebola virus. That epidemic killed more than 11,325 people, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The Bundibugyo strain currently seen in DRC has no approved vaccine or treatment currently, although several potential treatments and vaccines are being tested.