Deep dive: Ebola stalks Congo again

Your Proximities deep dive

Hello everyone,

I was working as an editor at Al Jazeera’s headquarters back in 2014 when West Africa was gripped by the worst Ebola epidemic in world history.

I vividly remember the early reports coming in of an outbreak and then the creeping sense as the numbers ticked up faster and faster that this was going to be huge. I also remember that it didn’t hit the top headlines in the international media until, you guessed it, Westerners started to get infected.

This cartoon by André Carrilho summed it up more eloquently than I ever could.

When the epidemic came to an end, more than 11,000 people had died.

Now, as mentioned in Proximities several times recently, there is a fast-spreading outbreak of the virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Making matters more complicated, this particular outbreak is of the rarer Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no approved vaccine.

According to officials, there have already been more than 900 suspected cases and 223 suspected deaths, and the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) has declared what it calls a “public health emergency of international concern.”

A Q&A with some more info below.

Bests,

Barry.

PS: Lots of new paid subscribers, so a reminder that there are over 30 deep dives here.

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That sounds like a lot of cases in a short space of time?

It is. The outbreak was only officially declared on May 15 and it’s already the third-largest on record. The caveat, though, is that officials suspect it had been spreading for several weeks before it was detected.

That has also put them on the back foot when it comes to containment, because a big part of getting an outbreak under control is locking down the area where it started and ring-fencing local populations. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it is spreading faster than initially believed, outpacing efforts to contain it, and that responders are playing “catch-up.”

It has also started to spread into neighboring Uganda.

What are experts saying?

Essentially, they’re ringing the alarm and crying out for more resources. Both the WHO and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said this has the potential to get out of control, with the Africa CDC already identifying nine countries – Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia – it believes are at risk.

Today, the military governor of Ituri province, which is the epicenter of the outbreak, told French broadcaster RFI that the struggle to contain the virus was a “war” that they didn’t have the resources to fight. His use of the term war was very deliberate because that’s another factor: eastern DRC is a hotbed of insecurity, and has been for years, with several armed groups operating in Ituri.

“Our existing resources were dedicated to the war, and this second war that is now upon us demands even more," Johnny Luboya Nkashama said on RFI.

As outlined in this BBC report, Africa CDC director-general Dr. Jean Kaseya has said several countries in the region have agreed to fund a $319m budget to respond to the outbreak, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has also pledged an initial $5m to support that plan. Kaseya said countries outside the continent would also contribute and that a group of African businessmen were meeting later this week to see if they could raise funds.

But they need a lot of money, and they need it fast.

How can the spread be arrested?