World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called an Emergency Committee meeting on the Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has already claimed around 130 lives.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was forced to withdraw its Ebola experts from an outbreak zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) amid heightened security concerns. The Ebola experts — among the most experienced on the planet — have been told by the State Department that they cannot travel to eastern DRC to help with the on-the-ground response.
High stakes drama is playing out almost daily as health workers and safe burial teams seek to win over communities who are deeply mistrustful of their intentions.
As the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reaches 194 cases and deaths hit 122, a humanitarian group added a new concern—the virus has now spread within a school.
Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak is expected to last several months and could spread to Uganda or Rwanda the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday, October 11.
The International Rescue Committee said it was alarmed that there were 33 new cases between October 1 and October 9, versus 41 cases during all of September.
There are now 181 total cases and 115 deaths in the ongoing outbreak in North Kivu province. Twenty-one cases are under investigation, the DRC Health Ministry said.
The Congolese health ministry, on October 6, reported another five confirmed cases of Ebola in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, blaming the higher-than-normal daily increase on community resistance to disease response efforts.
As of September 23, investigational agents had been administered to 38 patients — MAb114 (22), remdesivir (9), and ZMapp (7). Nineteen of these patients had been discharged, 12 had died, and seven had remained hospitalized; those who died were in advanced stages of disease when treatment was initiated.
More than two months since an Ebola outbreak was declared in an eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, health officials are still struggling to end it.