A doctor cares for a patient inside an isolate cube at The Alliance for
International Medical Action (ALIMA) treatment center in Beni, North
Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, on September 6, 2018.
PHOTO | REUTERS
The United States is worried about the outbreak of Ebola in
conflict-hit eastern Congo where there are 312 confirmed and probable
cases and 191 deaths, a USAID official said on Thursday.
“We
are absolutely concerned about the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic
Republic of Congo,” the senior USAID official, who is working with
response teams, told Reuters.
“It is not comparable at
this point to the outbreak that occurred in West Africa in 2014,” which
spread to nine countries and involved more than 28,000 cases, she said.
But
there is worry that the current outbreak was in an active conflict zone
in North Kivu, making it hard for health workers to track down and
isolate cases, the official said.
“It is occurring in
an area of active conflict, so physical insecurity is a persistent
challenge and complication to the ongoing response efforts,” the
official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“At
this point we are not seeing cases spread across any incredibly large
geographic area,” the official said, adding that most cases were in the
city of Beni and increasingly in nearby Butembo.
The rate of new cases has accelerated in recent weeks, and
neighbouring Uganda has said it will begin to vaccinate some of its
health workers against Ebola in case the viral haemorrhagic fever spread
from Congo.
Technical experts
The
World Health Organization’s committee has said that the outbreak did
not yet constitute a public health emergency of international concern.
The
USAID official said the United States had deployed over two dozen
technical experts to the country to work with Congo’s health ministry
since the outbreak was first reported in August.
Since
then, the United States had also deployed disaster and health experts
from USAID and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The official declined to give specifics about responses and funding because of the security threat from armed groups.
Congo has suffered 10 Ebola outbreaks since the virus was discovered near its eponymous Ebola River in 1976.
The
official said lessons learned from the West Africa Ebola crisis were
currently being applied in Congo, including improved approaches to
treatment and isolation that allow for better patient care
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