Confirmed Ebola cases in eastern DR Congo have passed 1,000 as violence, displacement and limited contact tracing complicate containment efforts.
Confirmed Ebola cases in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo have surpassed 1,000, health officials said, as armed violence and mass displacement complicate efforts to contain the outbreak in northeastern Ituri province.
DR Congo’s Ministry of Health said Sunday that 1,003 people have been infected and 254 have died since the outbreak was declared on May 15. The ministry said 100 people have recovered, while at least 365 patients are in hospitals or isolation.
The outbreak is being driven by the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola. Officials have said there is no approved vaccine or specific treatment for that strain, raising the stakes for rapid isolation, monitoring and contact tracing.
Those core containment efforts remain incomplete. The ministry said contact tracing has reached only about 55% of people who may have been exposed, leaving large gaps in a response that officials acknowledge may not yet reflect the full scale of infections. Authorities had yet to identify the first patient and were trying to trace more than 35,000 contacts as of last week.
“If you want to control an outbreak, especially an Ebola outbreak, you must know the index case,” Dr. Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Associated Press last week. “We don’t have confidence in when this outbreak started.”
The health emergency is unfolding in an area already destabilized by attacks attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces, an armed group linked to ISIL. In Ituri, violence has cut off access to some villages and forced thousands of people from their homes, including into camps where overcrowding can make disease surveillance and isolation harder.
At the Kigonze displacement camp near Bunia, where more than 20,000 people have taken shelter, camp officials reported 10 unexplained deaths last week and called for an urgent investigation. No Ebola cases had been confirmed at the site, officials said, but the deaths heightened concern about the vulnerability of displaced communities.
The U.N. refugee agency said Friday it was deeply concerned by the accelerating spread of the virus and the risks to displaced people. It said at least 2 million people forcibly displaced from their homes, including more than 320,000 refugees, live in areas of Congo considered at risk from Ebola.
Charité Banza, a civil society leader in Ituri, warned that an outbreak inside Kigonze would be devastating. “If a disease or epidemic were to spread among the thousands of people living at this site, it would be a real catastrophe, given our already very precarious living conditions,” Banza said.
Officials have cautioned that many infections may still be going undetected and that the outbreak’s peak could still be ahead. For now, the next measure of the response will be whether health teams can expand contact tracing and reach communities made inaccessible by violence before the virus spreads further among displaced populations.
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