World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday urged authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to urgently scale up the Ebola response and improve protection for frontline health workers as a deadly outbreak continues to spread rapidly.
The DRC declared its 17th Ebola outbreak on 15 May. According to figures published by the WHO, the outbreak has so far caused 3,874 confirmed cases, including 1,751 deaths.
Tedros arrived in Kinshasa on Tuesday and was scheduled to meet President Felix Tshisekedi, a spokesman told AFP on Wednesday.
After meeting organisations involved in the response effort, Tedros wrote on X that the outbreak was spreading faster than efforts to contain it.
“The outbreak is spreading faster than our scale-up of the response, with new cases doubling in some hotspots over the past week alone,” he said.
“We must urgently and massively scale up all our efforts,” he added, calling for greater access to affected communities despite insecurity and displacement, stronger coordination, and better protection, training and support for health workers.
He also stressed the need to accelerate access to treatment, disease surveillance and safe, dignified burials.
US boosts funding
The United States announced on Wednesday that it had allocated more than $242 million in additional funding to tackle the worsening outbreak.
The new allocation brings direct US financial assistance for the Ebola response to more than $500 million, the State Department said, adding that Washington remained the largest financial contributor to the effort.
Tedros had previously visited the DRC at the end of May, travelling to the northeastern province of Ituri, where nearly 90 per cent of Ebola cases have been reported.
The five affected provinces in eastern DRC have limited state presence, while healthcare infrastructure remains severely inadequate.
The challenges facing the response were highlighted this week in the Ituri mining town of Mongbwalu, where staff at an Ebola treatment centre protested over unpaid government allowances before being dispersed by police firing warning shots, according to hospital sources.
On Tuesday, a new 100-bed Ebola treatment centre opened in Ituri’s capital Bunia to help manage the rising number of patients, the UN aid agency OCHA said.
Ebola spreads through contact with bodily fluids and causes haemorrhagic fever. The disease has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa over the past five decades.
Vaccine and treatment trials
The current outbreak has been caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus, for which there is currently no approved vaccine or treatment.
Canada on Tuesday approved clinical trials of a potential Bundibugyo vaccine developed by US pharmaceutical company Moderna.
In late July, a volunteer received the first dose of another candidate vaccine against the strain, developed by the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom using the same technology as the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.
Singapore-based Hilleman Laboratories is also working to advance a third potential Bundibugyo vaccine towards human trials.
The WHO considers this candidate the “most promising” because it uses the same rVSV platform as Ervebo, the only officially licensed Ebola vaccine, which targets a different strain known as Zaire.
Two potential treatments are also being tested on confirmed Ebola patients in Ituri — the monoclonal antibody MBP134 and the antiviral drug remdesivir, both separately and in combination.
A trial is also underway in Ituri for the oral antiviral drug obeldesivir among people exposed to confirmed Bundibugyo Ebola cases.
