GoKawiilA health worker at a hospital in Ituri province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo asks for help in receiving a person suspected of having Ebola.Credit: Glody Murhabazi/AFP via Getty
The tally of people with suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola in central Africa is rocketing upwards with shocking speed — from 256 cases on 16 May to roughly 1,000 as of 27 May. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), some 240 people have died — and the outbreak shows no signs of slowing down (see ‘Ebola’s surge continues’).
But specialists say that they have tools to help to control the outbreak, which is for now confined to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, thanks to hard-won expertise gained during previous Ebola epidemics.
Source: WHO and WHO disease outbreak news reports/Resolve to Save Lives
The DRC, which is the epicentre of the current outbreak, has contended with several outbreaks of Ebola over the years, notes Chima Ohuabunwo, an epidemiologist at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. As a result, the DRC is one of the world’s most experienced countries in handling the virus species that cause the disease. “We should be in a better position to respond” than during previous outbreaks, Ohuabunwo says.
One challenge is that there is neither a vaccine nor a targeted treatment for the specific virus causing this outbreak, the Bundibugyo species of ebolavirus. This means that other measures will be needed to stop the virus’s march. Here are some of the measures that specialists recommend.
Increase testing and contact tracing
Ramping up the laboratory capacity to diagnose Ebola is essential to quickly identifying who is infected so that they can be isolated before they spread the virus to others, says Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Garry helped to respond to the largest Ebola epidemic on record, which caused more than 11,000 deaths in West Africa between 2014 and 2016.
But the current outbreak is straining the region’s testing capacity. “My understanding is that the main laboratory doing the tests is struggling” to keep up, says Garry. Of the 1,038 cases that had been reported by 27 May, 132 had been confirmed by lab testing as the Bundibugyo species. The DRC’s Ministry of Public Health, Hygiene and Prevention did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
According to the WHO, lab testing capacity is already being scaled up. The biotechnology company BioFire Defense in Salt Lake City, Utah, which produces a highly sensitive test that can detect multiple Ebola species, including Bundibugyo, announced on 19 May that it is increasing its production capacity.
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