Reuters —
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed 2,325 people, surpassing the number of deaths during the 2018-2020 outbreak and making it the deadliest in the country’s history, government data showed on Sunday.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s Institute of Public Health announced in its latest report that the number of confirmed infections has increased to 4,945, including 101 new cases detected in the past 24 hours.
The 17th outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is already the largest in the country’s history in terms of the number of infections, a milestone reached at the end of July. The total number of deaths exceeds the 2,299 deaths recorded during the 2018-2020 outbreak, the worst on record, according to the latest government data.
According to the data, the number of confirmed infections now stands at 4,945.
Three months after it was officially announced, the World Health Organization says the outbreak is now dwarfed by the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which recorded 28,616 infections and 11,310 deaths across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
While it took nearly five months from the time the outbreak was declared to reach 1,000 deaths, DRC’s current outbreak reached 2,000 deaths in less than three months.
The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, and there is no approved vaccine or treatment. The outbreak has gained momentum since it was declared on May 15, with weak health infrastructure, community resistance, and instability hampering efforts to identify and respond to cases.
The proportion of people who die from an outbreak after being confirmed infected, known as the case fatality rate, has risen to 46% from around 20% in early June, meaning almost one in two confirmed cases now dies, according to government data.
Experts say this trend does not indicate the virus is becoming more deadly. Rather, it points to continuing deficiencies in surveillance, case finding, and access to care.
“Typically, as an outbreak progresses, the case fatality rate should decrease as contact tracing improves and patients are identified and treated earlier,” said Thomas Parrish, a public health expert who was recently deployed to the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of Médecins Sans Frontières.
“Instead, we still see many cases where treatment is less likely to be successful, cases are detected very late, and many cases are identified only after death in the community.”
A small number of experimental vaccines and treatments are being evaluated, while health authorities around the world are assessing whether existing Ebola treatments offer protection. So far, evidence is limited to animal studies.
The outbreak first spread to neighboring Uganda, but authorities there were able to limit the deaths to two and infections to 20 before declaring the outbreak over in the country last month. Ebola is spread through direct contact with the body fluids of an infected person, living or dead. It can cause fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and in severe cases, internal and external bleeding.
