The Ebola disease epidemic has killed 1,001 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, according to a latest report released on Wednesday July 22 by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is based on data from Congolese health authorities.
A total of 999 deaths and 2,473 confirmed cases have been recorded in the DRC since the start of the epidemic, declared in mid-May, the WHO indicated in a situation update dated July 20. The toll remains at two deaths for 20 confirmed cases in neighboring Uganda, where the authorities said last week that they no longer had any patients. However, the country must wait another month without new cases to be officially considered free of the virus.
Ebola, which is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids and causes hemorrhagic fever, has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa over the past 50 years. The deadliest epidemic in the DRC caused nearly 2,300 deaths for 3,500 recorded patients, between 2018 and 2020.
Variant Bundibugyo
The 17th epidemic in the DRC, officially declared on May 15, is caused by the Bundibugyo variant for which there is no vaccine or treatment. A clinical trial of two treatments against this rare strain began in early July, according to the WHO, which also granted emergency use authorization to the first molecular diagnostic test for the virus. Last week, WHO also announced the first safety trial of the ChAdOx1 vaccine, led by the University of Oxford (UK).
The focus of the crisis, the real extent of which is still difficult to measure and which could last several months, is located in Ituri, a province in the northeast of Congo bordering South Sudan and Uganda. The province concentrates 89.1% of cases and 83.9% of deaths, according to the WHO. “The epidemic remains one step ahead of us and we are still in a phase where we are trying to catch up with its evolution,” Thierno Baldé, responsible for managing the incident at the WHO in the DRC, told the press in Geneva (Switzerland) on Tuesday.
“Certain areas, such as Bunia (capital of Ituri) and its surroundings, are experiencing very intense transmission”, we maintain “our priority on controlling the situation” in these areas, he specified. The virus is also present in four other provinces, including North Kivu and South Kivu, where the provincial capitals and large swaths of territory are controlled by the anti-government armed group M23.
