The World Health Organization said Wednesday that Ebola transmission is beginning to slow in the hardest-hit region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, even as the epidemic continues to kill people elsewhere in the country.
“We are starting to see encouraging signs that we’re gaining ground,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva.
The outbreak, Congo’s 17th since Ebola was first identified in 1976, was declared May 15 and centers on Ituri province in the country’s volatile east. It emerged just five months after the previous outbreak had been declared over. Within days of the declaration, the World Health Organization designated it a public health emergency of international concern, and the virus quickly crossed into neighboring Uganda. The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which no treatment or vaccine has yet been approved — a complicating factor absent from Congo’s larger 2018-2020 outbreak, the deadliest in the country’s history, which killed more than 2,200 people in North Kivu and Ituri.
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More than 3,500 deaths have now been recorded from over 7,200 cases spanning seven provinces in Congo’s north and east, regions where insecurity and the presence of armed groups have repeatedly slowed the response. Fighters from the Allied Democratic Forces, a rebel group aligned with the Islamic State, and a coalition of ethnic militias have hampered access in Ituri, while the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group controls several key cities further south, including Goma and Bukavu.
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Tedros said transmission is declining in Ituri, the epicenter of the outbreak and the province where more than 90 percent of cases have occurred, while South Kivu has not logged a new case since May. He credited expanding community engagement for accelerating trials of treatments and post-exposure prophylaxis, and said vaccine trials are expected to begin within weeks.
He cautioned against reading the improvement as a turning point. “Make no mistake: the epidemic continues to grow and continues to kill,” Tedros said.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s director of epidemic and pandemic management, said the response is far from finished. “We still have many, many months ahead of us,” she said.
Ebola spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids and can trigger severe internal and external bleeding along with organ failure. The virus has killed more than 15,000 people across Africa over the past 50 years. Congo has ended all 16 of its previous outbreaks, a record health officials have pointed to as grounds for confidence even as this one continues to strain a health system already contending with conflict, mass displacement and limited infrastructure across the affected provinces.
