Congo hampers Ebola response as WHO warns contact tracing is failing amid uncertainty | Today’s news

(Bloomberg) — Congo’s health minister dismissed claims that the country’s Ebola outbreak is out of control, even as World Health Organization officials warned that insecurity and population displacement are preventing responders from tracing most suspected contacts.

“I heard in the press that the epidemic is ‘out of control,'” Roger Kamba, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s minister of public health, hygiene and social welfare, told reporters Thursday in Bunia, the epicenter of the outbreak. “We need to set the alarm bells straight.”

Revised surveillance data released Thursday showed 906 suspected cases and 223 suspected deaths linked to the outbreak, down from more than 1,000 suspected infections reported Wednesday after investigators removed non-causal and laboratory-confirmed infections from a broader list.

Still, Kamba said the government expected it could take about six months to fully contain the outbreak, while health officials warned that insecurity and mass displacement were hampering efforts to stop the transmission of the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which has spread to neighboring Uganda and infected at least seven people.

“It’s a very difficult situation,” Marie Roseline Belizaire, the WHO’s emergency response director for Africa, told the BBC from Bunia. The teams were able to trace just over a third of the more than 2,500 identified contacts due to insecurity and population movement, she said. “And in an Ebola outbreak — or any infectious disease — if you can’t trace contacts, that means you can’t stop the chain of transmission.”

“Catastrophic Collision”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on Wednesday that eastern Congo was facing a “catastrophic collision” of war and disease as fighting and displacement accelerated the spread of Ebola. “We cannot build community trust or isolate the sick while the bombs are falling,” he said.

Many suspected Ebola cases are later ruled out after testing, Kamba said, adding that authorities deliberately cast a wide surveillance net rather than risk missing infections.

“We’d rather be wrong about overcounting than undercounting,” he said.

The epidemic has also prompted the US to expand border control measures. The United States expanded enhanced airport screening for Ebola at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport effective midnight Thursday, adding the nation’s busiest international gateway to a growing network of screening hubs that already includes Washington Dulles, Atlanta and Houston, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The measures are part of what the CDC described as a layered response that includes screening upon departure from overseas, reporting of air sickness and post-arrival monitoring. Bloomberg previously reported that the agency asked employees to volunteer for public health screening duties at airports.

The epidemic now covers 13 health zones in the Congolese provinces of Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu.

A report on Congo’s internal Ebola situation released on Thursday described the mining town of Mongbwalu – believed to be the epicenter of the outbreak – as an area affected by armed groups and frequent cross-border population movements into Uganda. The report also noted that a confirmed Ebola patient had escaped from a treatment facility in Ituri, underscoring the difficulties faced by emergency workers in the outbreak in conflict-affected areas.

The Bundibugyo strain can be particularly difficult to identify because it doesn’t always cause the severe hemorrhagic bleeding associated with the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, Kamba said. Early symptoms can instead resemble malaria, typhus and other diseases common in eastern Congo, complicating efforts to quickly identify cases and determine causes of death.

Kamba also sought to play down concerns that the outbreak had already spread outside Ituri province, saying only 21 confirmed cases had been identified outside the region. “Maybe there are cases that we don’t know about, but you know that in our country nobody can hide a dead body,” he said. “They’re all buried. If there were hidden burials, we’d know.”

Bundibugyo may also prove less deadly than Zaire, the more common type of Ebola, if patients receive supportive treatment early, Kamba said, adding that the current survival rate appears to be around 70%.

Egypt recently donated supplies of the antiviral remdesivir to Gilead Sciences Inc., which can help in some cases, Kamba said. Congo is also in talks with US officials to obtain an experimental treatment with monoclonal antibodies that have shown activity against Bundibugyo, Sudan and Zaire forms of Ebola.

Congo plans to add about 130 isolation beds at two treatment centers in the coming days as authorities scramble to expand capacity in outbreak areas, Kamba said. Officials are also working with community radio stations to counter misinformation and encourage people with symptoms to seek treatment early.

–With help from Madison Muller.

More such stories are available at bloomberg.com