The number of confirmed cases of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has surpassed 5,500 amid rapid transmission of the disease across different locations of the country, an official at the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).
Speaking at the African High-Level Ministerial Committee meeting on Sunday evening at the headquarters of the Africa CDC in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Wessam Mankoula, operations manager for the Ebola response at Africa CDC, warned of the disease’s rapid spread across a wider geographic area during its first 100 days.
“The outbreak is rapidly spreading, gaining more space. It is now the fastest growing Ebola outbreak that we have ever seen, and the second largest Ebola outbreak in history,” Mankoula said.
According to the latest update from the Africa CDC and DRC authorities, DR. Congo has recorded a total of 5,514 confirmed cases and 2,642 deaths, with a case fatality rate of 47.9 percent. A total of 1,200 patients have recovered from the disease so far.
The Africa CDC indicated that the outbreak has expanded from just three health zones in a single province when it was declared on May 15, to about 57 health zones across the DRC’s six provinces.
“The outbreak is rapidly spreading. To give you a clearer picture of the geographical distribution of the cases in DRC, the affected provinces are larger than 36 member states in Africa.
They are bigger than France, bigger than Spain, bigger than Germany. These provinces have a population more than 38 countries in the continent,” Mankoula said.
He said compared to the largest Ebola outbreak (in West Africa), this rapidly evolving outbreak is by far 9.7 times the number of cases and 7.1 times the number of deaths that were reported in West Africa during the first 13 weeks of the outbreak.
MG/abj/APA