Overview
- The World Health Organization reported this week that confirmed cases have topped 5,000 and more than 2,320 people have died, making this the deadliest Ebola outbreak in DRC history.
- WHO Director-General Tedros told an emergency meeting on Tuesday that the epidemic is "far from being under control" and called for greater international assistance to help break hidden chains of transmission.
- Responders are scaling up operations by adding roughly 400 treatment beds, deploying 100 expert epidemiologists and recruiting over 500 community health workers to decentralize surveillance and care.
- Teams are shifting to community-focused tactics, for example recruiting motorbike taxi drivers as surveillance and response agents because they regularly transport sick people and bodies between villages and towns.
- The outbreak is driven by the rarer Bundibugyo strain, which has no licensed vaccine or approved therapy, so control depends on faster detection, supportive care, safe burials and success in ongoing trials of experimental vaccines and treatments.