The countries neighboring the Democratic Republic of Congo are at high risk from Ebola and should act immediately to counter the virus, the World Health Organization’s head said on Monday. “Countries bordering DRC are at especially high risk and should take immediate action,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, adding that he would travel on Tuesday to the DRC, the epicentre of the current outbreak of the deadly disease.
“The outbreak is spreading rapidly,” Tedros told a virtual ministerial meeting on the viral haemorrhagic fever, which spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can cause severe bleeding and organ failure. He said the current outbreak was “especially challenging”. “First, the delay in detecting the outbreak means that we are now playing catch-up with a very fast-moving epidemic.
We are urgently scaling up operations but at the moment, the epidemic is outpacing us,” he said by videolink from Geneva. Secondly, the eastern provinces of the DRC, where the outbreak was first detected on May 15, “are highly insecure, with intensified fighting in recent months (and) there is also significant distrust of outside authorities among the local population”.
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