DRC Ebola deaths top 1,300 as virus ‘spreads like wildfire’ | News about Ebola

Nairobi, Kenya – The number of people who die from the latest Ebola burst into Democratic Republic of Congo it has topped 1,309, a staggering rise of more than 40 per cent in just five days, government figures show, as a leading health adviser says the virus is “spreading like wildfire”.

Data updated by the government on Saturday showed that as of Thursday, all confirmed cases, including deaths, were to climb to 2,973. This was a 27 percent increase from the figure last Saturday.

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The ever-increasing number of cases and the rising death toll have made the DRC epidemic an epidemic. very widespread The Ebola outbreak was documented long ago.

Adding to the danger, the virus spreading in the DRC is Bundibugyo, which is one of the four rarest strains of Ebola known to infect humans and currently has no approved vaccine or treatment.

Abdulsalami Nasidi, a medical consultant who helped establish the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the African Union’s health agency, told Al Jazeera the lack of a proven vaccine means the virus “is spreading like wildfire.”

Nasidi said the epidemic is spreading in the area active warfarewhich adds to the shortage of medical aid that is associated with African governments facing epidemics.

Scientists are racing to find a way to slow down the epidemic, and the University of Oxford’s Oxford Vaccine Group. he said a volunteer had received the first dose of the rapidly developed experimental vaccine on Friday.

“This is a very important step in this trial, and it is the next step in our international collaboration to develop a vaccine against the Bundibugyo ebolavirus,” said the Oxford team’s principal investigator, Katrina Pollock.

The main thing is very deadly The Ebola epidemic has historically killed more than 11,000 of at least 28,000 people between 2013 and 2016, mostly in West Africa across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The plague lasted for about eight months and 1,000 people died. The latest outbreak in the DRC has done this in less than 10 weeks.

“We must act now,” Director-General of Africa CDC Jean Kaseya wrote in a letter on X last week. “If we don’t stop today, this will be the worst epidemic in the world.”

Al Jazeera’s Alain Uaykani, who reported from the DRC city of Goma, said the government’s actions lacked coordination and urgency, leaving health workers overwhelmed and overworked.

He said the death toll among health workers continued to rise on Saturday, with doctors and health workers being the latest victims.

More than 100 health workers have been infected since the outbreak began in May, and at least 35 have died, fueled by a lack of personal protective equipment and, in some areas, hostility from people who question whether the disease is real.

A growing number of health workers in several hospitals in the north-east of Ituri, who are responsible for the outbreak, have gone on strike over unpaid wages and unsafe working conditions.

Last week, workers at Rwampara General Hospital near Bunia went on strike. The hospital is a major Ebola treatment center, parts of which were set on fire in May by angry mobs who chased away medical workers fleeing in vehicles.

The latest strike began on Saturday at the Elikya Ebola Treatment Center in the provincial capital of Bunia. Services were largely suspended as doctors, nurses and security personnel stopped work.

About 100 workers protested outside the facility, saying the unpaid bonuses were damaging morale and interfering with patient care.

“We have to be compensated, because at this point the disease is spreading in the treatment center,” Martin Bolombi, one of the workers affected, told The Associated Press. “I’ve already lost five people who are still inside. A solution must be found for us,”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that the actual number of cases could be twice as high as the official figure, as insecurity continues to hinder the affected population.

The search is now reaching about 80 percent of the identified population, he said, but response teams are unable to reach every village or dispatch where they are most in need.

The United States and Canada have both banned the entry of travelers who have recently arrived in the DRC, measures that go against WHO guidelines issued in May, when it declared a global emergency.

Tedros has called for an end to the conflict that has escalated in the east of the DRC, saying that medical aid alone is not enough to deal with the crisis, and that there is a need to do more to open up opportunities for those who respond to the virus before it reaches the regions that have not yet been affected.