The toll from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has risen to an estimated 131 deaths from 513 suspected cases, Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba says.
Previous figures from the epidemic, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared an international health emergency, were 91 people dead out of 350 suspected cases.
The WHO chief said on Tuesday that he was “deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic”, which has already started spreading into Uganda.
“Early on Sunday, I declared a public health emergency of international concern over an epidemic of Ebola disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda,” Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the World Health Assembly in Geneva on Tuesday.
A meeting of the WHO’s Emergency Committee is scheduled for later on Tuesday to discuss the Ebola outbreak, Tedros said.
An emergency committee is made up of international experts who provide technical advice and recommendations to the WHO chief.
No vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is behind the latest outbreak of the disease, which has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the past half-century.
Kamba cautioned that the current death toll was an estimate and further research was needed to confirm whether all 131 suspected deaths were indeed caused by Ebola.
The outbreak’s epicentre is in the northeastern province of Ituri on the border with Uganda and South Sudan, whose status as a gold-mining hub leads to people regularly crisscrossing it.
The virus has already spread into neighbouring provinces, as far as 200km (125 miles) away from what has been identified as the epidemic’s ground zero and also beyond the DRC’s borders.
A World Health Organization official said that six tons of supplies to fight Ebola were set to arrive in the DRC on Tuesday, including personal protective equipment and other medical supplies.
Credit: aljazeera.com
