Ebola fears surge over rapid spread of a rare type

BUNIA (AP):

Anxious healthcare workers in eastern Congo said yesterday that they are underprotected and undertrained as a rare type of Ebola spreads rapidly in some of the world’s most remote and vulnerable areas.

“It’s truly sad and painful because we’ve already been through a security crisis, and now Ebola is here too,” said Justin Ndasi, a resident of Bunia, site of the first known death that was announced last week after what experts call a worrying delay in detecting the virus.

The response unfolds in a region long threatened by armed groups that have kept a large part of the population on the run and control a major city where Ebola cases have been confirmed, complicating health workers’ catch-up efforts to trace the outbreak. The World Health Organization (WHO), which noted a low risk globally, has said “patient zero” has not been found.

In Bunia, where tons of health supplies have been airlifted, residents said masks are harder to find and some disinfectants that previously sold for 2,500 Congolese francs (about $1) now cost four times more.

The disease struck suddenly, they said, describing a rapid deterioration after symptoms were mistaken for illnesses such as malaria.

“He told me his heart was hurting, and I thought it was his stomach,” said Botwine Swanze, who lost her son. “Then he started crying because of the pain in his stomach. After that, he started vomiting. Then he started bleeding and vomiting a lot.”

The Ebola virus is highly contagious and spreads in the human population through contact with bodily fluids such as vomit, blood or semen. Symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain and, at times, internal and external bleeding.

‘The scale of the epidemic is much larger’

The WHO has declared the outbreak a public health emergency and international concern, and expressed worry over its “scale and speed”. The WHO head in Congo says it would last at least two months.

The rare type of Ebola, known as the Bundibugyo virus, spread undetected for weeks following the first known death, while authorities tested for another, more common Ebola virus and came up negative.

Investigations continued into where and when the outbreak started, but “given the scale, we are thinking that it started probably a couple of months ago”, said Anaïs Legand, a technical officer in the WHO emergencies programme.

So far, 51 cases have been confirmed in Congo’s northern provinces of Ituri and North Kivu, and two cases in Uganda, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday. There are 139 suspected deaths and almost 600 suspected cases.

But “the scale of the epidemic is much larger”, he said.

The London-based MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis estimated that cases have been substantially undercounted and the actual number could already exceed 1,000. “The true magnitude remains uncertain”, the research group said in a statement.

This is Congo’s 17th Ebola outbreak, and the WHO has said its health ministry has experienced staff and capacity to respond. Most outbreaks, however, were of the more common Ebola type.