Ebola in Congo Spreads Southward to Large Cities

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is now the second-largest in history. The current outbreak, declared on August 1, has 471 identified cases of which 423 are confirmed, including 225 confirmed deaths. That is nowhere near the size of the 2014-2016 outbreak that killed more than 11,300 people.

The big difference between the current outbreak and the 2014 outbreak is that an experimental vaccine is available this time, and it seems to be working. Teams of health workers from Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) have vaccinated more than 41,000 people so far. It is estimated that without the vaccine, there would already be more than 10,000 Ebola cases in the current outbreak.

The vaccine is used in conjunction with contact tracing. When an Ebola case is suspected, health workers identify the patient’s contacts and their contacts, and all those people are given the vaccine, in case they have been infected.

The current epidemic is centered around the city of Beni in North Kivu province, which is in the middle of a war zone with a population of 400,000. Militias have attacked health workers, making it almost impossible to do the contact tracing necessary to stop the progress of the disease, so it may be 6-12 more months before the current epidemic can be stopped completely.

More worrisome is that the outbreak has been spreading southward and there are now identified cases in the city of Butembo, which has one million residents.

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