The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) is convening a three-day meeting today of African countries in hopes of strengthening regional preparedness for the growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has now claimed more than 300 lives.
The meeting will include officials from the DRC, neighboring Uganda, and 11 other high-risk African Union member states, along with the members of the World Health Organization (WHO) and other key technical partners. The countries will review their national preparedness status, share lessons from the outbreak response, and strengthen collaboration across borders, Africa CDC officials said.
“Africa CDC is working with Member States and partners to move from plans to operational readiness at borders, in communities, in health facilities and inside emergency operations centres,” Africa CDC senior official Tolbert Nyenswah, DrPH, said in a press release.
Could grow to be largest Ebola outbreak ever
The outbreak, which is now the second largest in the DRC, shows no signs of slowing and currently stands at 1,155 confirmed cases and 304 deaths. Neighboring Uganda has 20 confirmed cases and two deaths. In a press conference yesterday, Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya, MD, MPH, warned that if contact tracing efforts don’t pick up, “for sure it will be the largest Ebola outbreak ever.”
Kaseya said healthcare workers in the DRC need to be able find and monitor 80% of the contacts of Ebola patients to control the outbreak, but the current figure is only 30%, the New York Times reports.
Africa CDC is working with Member States and partners to move from plans to operational readiness at borders, in communities, in health facilities and inside emergency operations centres.
Among the countries at risk as the outbreak grows is South Sudan, which has some of the weakest healthcare infrastructure in the region and sits on the northeastern border of DRC, where the outbreak is centered. In a modeling study published yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, researchers with the WHO Regional Office for Africa estimated there’s a nearly 70% chance of at least one case in the country over the next four months.
“Cross-border movement between eastern DR Congo, Uganda, and South Sudan occurs through both formal and informal routes, with many individuals crossing borders daily for trade, health care, and family visits,” the study authors wrote. “Such mobility substantially increases the likelihood of regional spillovers.”
The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, which has no licensed therapeutics or vaccines and is the least described of the viruses that cause Ebola. It’s only the third outbreak caused by the strain since Ebola was discovered in 1976.
CDC raises its response level
In a media briefing today, officials with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the continued growth of the outbreak has prompted the agency to raise its level of response to level 1 activation—the CDC’s highest level of emergency response.
“We are very concerned about the trajectory of cases, which are rising rapidly, as well as the continued geographic spread,” said Satish Pillai, MD, MPH, the incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response. “Elevating the response level reflects the urgency, scale, and complexity of the outbreak. and allows CDC to bring additional resources to support the coordination and operational needs of our response.”
The last time activated a level 1 response was during the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak, which sickened more than 28,000 people and killed more than 11,000. Pillai said the upgraded response level means that the outbreak is now a top priority within the agency and that CDC officials will mobilize staff and additional resources “as efficiently and rapidly as possible.”
“The purpose of this is to signal the internally how seriously our acting director and our agency leadership take this response,” he said.
Pillai reiterated that the risk to the United States remains low.
