According to figures released on Tuesday by Congolese health authorities, 2,011 people have died in the latest outbreak, out of 4,381 confirmed cases of the virus.

The latest toll puts it close behind the DRC‘s deadliest Ebola outbreak to date in 2018 to 2020, when nearly 2,300 people died out of 3,500 recorded cases.

The DRC’s 17th surge of the highly contagious disease, the current outbreak is already considered the largest in the country’s history “and could well become the largest outbreak ever”, Sania Nishtar, chief executive of the Gavi global vaccine alliance, has said.

Concentrated in the DRC’s eastern and northeastern regions, it was declared on 15 May but is thought to have been spreading for several weeks before then.

The surge began in northeastern Ituri province and spread to several other provinces, notably North Kivu, regions subject to years of conflict where health infrastructure and a state presence are largely lacking.

Ebola cases near 4,000 as DRC struggles to contain fast-spreading outbreak

Response criticised

The case fatality rate of the current outbreak is estimated by Congolese health authorities to be 45.9 percent.

“We haven’t reached the peak yet,” Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba said in an interview shared on social media by his ministry on Tuesday.

“Within the next three months, we expect to have already brought the spread under control and to start seeing it decline,” he added.

Insecurity due to the presence of armed groups and mistrust of the local population have hampered the response to the outbreak in the affected regions.

“We are only seeing 30 percent (of infected people), where 70 percent of people are dying at home. This is why this Ebola is different,” Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa, told reporters in Ituri’s provincial capital, Bunia, on Monday.

Congolese virologist Jean-Jacques Muyembe, who helped discover Ebola in 1976, said in an interview with Tuesday’s Le Monde newspaper that the response had been “slow and ineffective”.

“There is an internal problem at the level of the national coordination of the response,” he said.

“Everyone wanted to show they were doing something, even though nothing had actually been organised.”

Vaccine trials underway

On Friday, WHO vaccine experts recommended a full-scale human trial of the only existing approved Ebola vaccine to see if it offered cross-protection against the strain of Ebola currently spreading in the DRC, against which no specific vaccine currently exists.

The Ervebo vaccine has proved safe and efficacious against the more common Zaire strain of Ebola virus and WHO experts said that early data, notably from animal trials, showed it may also give some protection against the rare Bundibugyo strain exploding in the DRC.

The Gavi global vaccine alliance – set up in 2000 to help developing countries acquire affordable vaccines – maintains a stockpile of 500,000 Ervebo doses.

It said doses from the stockpile were to be made available for the trials, with some already in the DRC.

DRC trials experimental treatment for rare Ebola strain as outbreak worsens

Two potential Bundibugyo vaccines are in the early stages of clinical trials on humans, while a third is being worked on to bring it to that stage.

The United States announced last Wednesday that it had allocated more than $242 million (€209 million) in additional funding to combat the worsening outbreak.

The new funding brings direct US financial assistance in response to the outbreak to more than $500 million (€433 million), the State Department said, underlining that the United States remained “the largest financial contributor to the Ebola response”.

Ebola is spread by contact with bodily fluids and causes a haemorrhagic fever. It has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the last 50 years.

The WHO emergency committee is set to meet to discuss the epidemic next Tuesday.

(with AFP)