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Confirmed cases in the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo have reached 1,003, including 254 deaths, officials said, as contact tracing remains a major challenge.
100 people have recovered from the incident that struck Ituri province since it was announced on May 15, the Congolese Ministry of Health said on Sunday. At least 365 patients are in hospitals or in isolation, it said.
The Ebola outbreak has been the worst ever in its first month. It was caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, for which there is no vaccine or treatment. Officials acknowledge that there may be many more undiagnosed cases and that the peak of the outbreak is yet to come.
Contact tracing remains a key issue for local authorities, which only achieved a 55 percent coverage rate, the department said.
“If you want to control an outbreak, especially an Ebola outbreak, you must know the index case. We don’t know when this outbreak started,” Dr. Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Associated Press last week.
CBC’s Eli Glasner asked a doctor on the front lines of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo about the impact of cuts to foreign aid, including the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year.
Officials are also yet to identify patient zero and trace more than 35,000 people who have been in contact with people infected with the virus since last week.
This is because eastern Congo is also fighting ongoing rebel violence. In Ituri, attacks by the Islamic State-backed Allied Democratic Force have blocked access to many towns and forced people to flee their homes, including those sheltering in overcrowded camps and others on the move.
More than a month after the outbreak, officials believe the disease continues to outpace response efforts and no one knows its true extent.
The rapid spread of the disease in the three eastern states of Congo has prompted warnings from African health experts that the disease could eventually overtake the epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people across West Africa from 2014 to 2016.
Displaced people are vulnerable
At Kigonze camp in Bunia, the capital of Ituri, camp officials said on Friday that 10 people died last week in unusual circumstances, raising fears of an outbreak in the camp of more than 20,000 homeless people.
There was no confirmed case of Ebola in the area, camp officials said, but added that the death rate was unprecedented and called for an investigation.
The UN refugee agency said at least two million people who were forcibly displaced from their homes, including more than 320,000 refugees, live in Ebola-prone areas in Congo.
In a statement on Friday, the agency said it was “deeply concerned about the rapid spread” of the virus and the “increasing risk it poses to displaced communities across the region.”
“If a disease or epidemic can spread among the thousands of people who live in this [Kizonge] in the area, it would be a real disaster considering our already dangerous living conditions,” said Charité Banza, a civil society leader in Ituri.
So far, about a fifth of confirmed cases have been children, according to preliminary data from the UN children’s agency UNICEF.
