GENEVA,: The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo could reach unprecedented proportions, reported German Press Agency (dpa).
The epidemic in the Congo is spreading at record speed, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.
“It is already the second-biggest Ebola epidemic on record, and it is moving faster than any previous Ebola outbreak,” he added.
“At its current pace, it is on track to eclipse the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 to 2016,” he warned at a press conference in Geneva.
In West Africa at that time, more than 28,600 people were infected and more than 11,300 died.
In the Congo, according to the latest WHO figures, around 4,400 people have been infected in recent months, and more than 2,000 have died from the deadly disease.
Tedros said that far too few contacts of infected people were still being traced to halt the outbreak.
It is worrying how many people are still dying in their communities without first having been registered on the Ebola contact lists, the WHO head said.
Most infections are thought to originate from untreated patients in the late stages of the disease, or from funerals.
“The outbreak had a huge head start and is still far ahead of us. We are now trying to catch up,” Tedros said.
To break the chains of transmission, 95 per cent of all contacts would need to be traced in future, rather than just 80 per cent as has been the case so far, he said.
Thousands more health care workers need to be trained and the number of treatment beds needs to be tripled to 3,000, he added. – BERNAMA-dpa
