Congo's Ebola Epidemic Passes 4,000 Deaths
Figures released on Friday put the death toll at 4,018, with 8,300 confirmed cases across seven provinces — already the largest and deadliest outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s history. The World Health Organisation warns the epidemic is “far from over” and on course to surpass the 2014 to 2016 West African outbreak, which killed more than eleven thousand people.
What makes this one so hard to stop is that it is being fought inside a war. The United Nations reported on Friday that soldiers searching for weapons burned a camp housing a transit centre for infected patients on the outskirts of Bunia, the capital of Ituri province and the epicentre of the outbreak, forcing nineteen thousand people to flee. Displacing that many people from an epicentre is the opposite of containment, and it was done by the state’s own forces. The medical problem is as unforgiving: this is the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no approved vaccine or treatment, with several still in trials — so the tools that eventually brought earlier Congolese outbreaks under control do not exist here. It is the country’s seventeenth outbreak and was declared in May. Watch whether the trial vaccines are authorised for emergency use, because nothing else is likely to change the trajectory.