The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spread to a sixth province, officials have said, a day after the head of the World Health Organization said the outbreak was on track to surpass the deadliest in history, which killed at least 11,000 people more than a decade ago.
The current outbreak has killed more than 2,100 people out of more than 4,500 cases, according to the latest government figures released on Tuesday. At the same point in the 2014-16 outbreak in west Africa, the previous most deadly outbreak, 755 cases had been recorded, according to WHO data.
Jean Kaseya, the director general of Africa CDC, said on Thursday that a death had been recorded in the previously unaffected Bas-Uele province. The man had travelled from Isiro, in Haut-Uele province, to Buta, the capital of Bas-Uele, where he died, Kaseya said.
There are no approved vaccines or treatments for the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus that is responsible for the current outbreak.
The death toll has been reached almost three times faster than in the 2014-16 outbreak. On Wednesday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said the current outbreak would surpass that one based on its current pace.
Six of DRC’s 26 provinces have now been affected, mainly those along the country’s north-eastern border. More than 3,400 of the cases have been recorded in Ituri province, where the outbreak was first reported.
Uganda has reported 20 cases, all in the capital, Kampala. The last case there was reported on 21 June and no community transmission has been recorded.
The DRC outbreak is unfolding amid strikes by some unpaid health workers, global development aid cuts, threats by rebel groups, anger from long-traumatised communities, and misinformation claiming that Ebola is not real.
Health workers at the Nizi treatment centre in Ituri province went on strike on Thursday, leading to the temporary closure of the centre, saying they had not been paid for three months.
The true scope of the outbreak remains unknown. It was declared on 15 May but the WHO says sequencing now shows it began months earlier in February.
Health authorities have said between 60% and 70% of new cases are recorded outside contacts being monitored, and that the disease is spreading at an alarming rate.
Dr Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO regional director for Africa, said this week: “We are chasing the virus; the virus is ahead of us.”
Nonetheless, his colleague Abdirahman Mahamud, the head of the WHO’s emergency response division, sounded a note of optimism on Wednesday, saying that if the pandemic response was implemented “at the same time across the five transmission zones, we are expecting a turnaround in three months”.
Even with that, Mahamud said the peak of the outbreak would not be reached for six months under a “moderate” scenario and that the outbreak could last nine to 12 months.
Ebola is rare but highly contagious and can be contracted from body fluids such as vomit, blood or semen, including from dead bodies, and from contaminated surfaces and materials such as bedding and clothing. The disease it causes is severe and often fatal.
Clinical trials of two possible treatments for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola causing this outbreak began last month in Ituri. Tedros said on Wednesday two vaccines developed specifically for this strain were now being tested on people for the first time.
This strain of Bundibugyo is genetically different from previous outbreaks in 2007 and 2012, making it likely that this outbreak began when the virus jumped from an infected animal to a human, researchers said in a paper published this week in the journal Nature Medicine. They had sequenced genomes from samples from 22 people with Ebola.
Last week, Kaseya said officials were worried the virus could be mutating and that the Africa CDC was planning further studies with the WHO to investigate.
Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this story.