WHO Chief Urges Stronger Ebola Response During DR Congo Visit

World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called for an urgent and massive scale-up of efforts against the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has recorded 3,874 confirmed cases including 1,751 deaths, according to WHO figures.

Tedros arrived in Kinshasa on Tuesday and was set to meet President Felix Tshisekedi, a spokesman told AFP on Wednesday without giving further details.

"The outbreak is spreading faster than our scale-up of the response, with new cases doubling in some hotspots over the past week alone," Tedros wrote on X after meeting organisations involved in the response.

"We must urgently and massively scale up all our efforts," he said, adding that this meant "reaching every affected community despite insecurity and displacement, strengthening coordination… ensuring health workers have the protection, training and support they need, and accelerating access to care, surveillance and safe, dignified burials".

US funding boost

The United States announced on Wednesday it had allocated more than US$242 million in additional funding to combat the worsening outbreak. The State Department said the money brings direct US financial assistance for the outbreak to more than US$500 million, underlining that the US remained "the largest financial contributor to the Ebola response".

The DRC declared its 17th Ebola outbreak on May 15. Tedros previously visited the northeastern province of Ituri in late May, where nearly 90% of cases have been identified. The five affected provinces in eastern DRC have a weak state presence and largely lack healthcare infrastructure.

The difficulty of containing the outbreak was laid bare this week in the Ituri mining town of Mongbwalu, where staff at an Ebola treatment centre protested over unpaid government allowances before being dispersed by police warning shots, according to hospital sources. On Tuesday, a new 100-bed treatment centre opened in Ituri's capital Bunia to help handle the growing number of patients, UN aid agency OCHA said.

Vaccines and treatments

The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo species of the virus, for which there is no approved vaccine or treatment. On Tuesday, Canada cleared US drugmaker Moderna to begin clinical trials of a candidate Bundibugyo vaccine. In late July, a volunteer received the first dose of another potential vaccine developed by Britain's Oxford University using the same technology as the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

Singapore-based Hilleman Laboratories is working to bring a third candidate to human trials, which the WHO considers the "most promising" as it uses the same rVSV platform as Ervebo, the only licensed Ebola vaccine, which targets the Zaire strain.

Two potential treatments are being tested on confirmed patients in Ituri: the monoclonal antibody MBP134 and the antiviral remdesivir, alone and in combination. A trial of the oral antiviral obeldesivir is also under way in Ituri for people exposed to confirmed Bundibugyo cases.

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