The World Health Organisation (WHO) has on Monday 1st April, 2019 expressed worries over the increasing rate at which the Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo is spreading. The WHO reported that the Ebola virus is spreading at its fastest rate eight months after it was first detected.
As a result of militia violence and community resistance acting as hindrance to the accessing areas worse affected by the epidemic, there have been reports of high numbers of new cases of people affected by the epidemic leading to a major setback in an effort to curtail what the WHO has described as the second biggest Ebola outbreak ever.
About three week ago, the WHO were hopeful that the Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo who have been contained and could probably stopped by September, 2019 when the weekly new cases dropped by half to about 25 per week.
This hope was however dashed as the rate of spread peaked two weeks ago. According to WHO spokesman, Christian Lindmeier, “The number of cases hit a record 57 the following week, and then jumped to 72 last week.
The worst record before this new unimaginable increase was around 50 cases per week in late January and mid-November.
The major worries expressed by the WHO is that more than half of the Ebola deaths last week occurred outside of treatment centers, according to Congo health ministry data, meaning there is a much greater chance they transmitted the virus to those around them. A situation which Christian Lindmeier, lamented that, “People are becoming infected without access to response measures.”
The Ebola virus outbreak currently occurring in the Democratic Republic of Congo is believed to have killed 676 people and infected 406 others while another 331 patients have recovered.
The recent increase in the spread of the virus could be attributed to the challenges facing care-givers and mistrust by the people. In the past two months, five Ebola centers have been attacked, some by armed militiamen. That led French medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) to suspend its activities in two of the most affected areas.
Also the case of mistrust had been noticed as another challenge when a survey conducted last September by medical journal, The Lancet found that a quarter of people sampled in two Ebola hotspots did not believe the disease was real.
However the issue of mistrust is reported to be on the as Christian Lindmeier of the WHO noted that new approaches to community outreach were showing signs of progress and that some previously hostile local residents had recently agreed to grant health workers access. He noted that one treatment center that closed in February, 2019 after being torched by unknown assailants reopened last week.
