Guinea, DRC Respond to New Ebola Outbreaks

ADF STAFF

Five years after West Africa defeated a major Ebola outbreak, health care workers are rushing to stop new outbreaks in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) before they can spread.

At the end of February, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 17 Ebola cases and seven deaths in Guinea and eight cases and four deaths in the DRC. Teams have begun so-called ring vaccinations in both countries to protect people who may have come into contact with those exposed to the virus.

Ring vaccinations control an outbreak by vaccinating and monitoring a ring of people around each infected individual, forming a buffer to keep the disease from spreading.

“The governments of the region see the vaccine as a viable response pillar in their fight against the rapid control of Ebola,” Mosoka Fallah, former director general for the National Public Health Institute of Liberia, told ADF. “We have seen that the citizens are not putting up resistance or distrusting the news of the new Ebola cases.”

The start of vaccinations in Guinea and the DRC is leading to hope that the outbreak will be contained in a timely manner, Dr. Ngoy Nsenga, the WHO’s emergency response program manager at the Africa Regional Office, said during a February 25 news conference.

According to the WHO, health care workers had traced nearly 500 contacts in Guinea and vaccinated more than 1,000 people by the end of February.

Ebola has emerged as Guinea also fights the spread of COVID-19, yellow fever and measles.

In Guinea, the Ebola outbreak arose after the funeral of a nurse who died January 28 in Gouecke, a rural community in N’Zerekore prefecture. Five members of her family contracted Ebola; two of her brothers died.

N’Zerekore prefecture borders Liberia and is close to the western border of Côte d’Ivoire, raising the potential for cross-border transmission.

Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone experienced the worst Ebola outbreak on record from 2014 to 2016 when more than 11,300 people died from the disease.

Guinean Prime Minister Ibrahima Kassory Fofana announced the current Ebola outbreak on Twitter on February 15. His message to his audience: Don’t panic.

“In recent years, the country has set up structures to deal with this type of epidemic,” Fofana wrote. “Ebola will be defeated again.”

Taking lessons from that experience, health care systems in countries around Guinea have begun monitoring cross-border traffic to prevent further spread, according to Dr. Merawi Aragaw Tegegne, acting head of emergency preparedness and response at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Aragaw told a news conference in late February that the WHO has deployed 11,300 Ebola vaccine doses to Guinea and has begun screening travelers at ports of entry.

“The investigation is still going on to get out the origin of the outbreak,” Aragaw said.

Cross-border transmission also is a concern in the North Kivu region of the DRC, which abuts Uganda and Rwanda. Health care workers traced nearly 1,000 contacts and vaccinated nearly 660 people as of the end of February, Aragaw said. He emphasized that the Guinea and DRC outbreaks are not connected.

Security issues make it difficult to detect cases and trace the contacts of those infected, according to the WHO. More than 4,300 vaccine doses were shipped to North Kivu in late February. They will supplement about 8,000 vaccine doses that still were available in the country at the end of previous Ebola outbreak, which was declared over on November 18.

Soon after the outbreaks began, the WHO released $1.25 million to boost Guinea’s response and to reinforce readiness in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund released $15 million to support Guinea and the DRC and boost readiness in the neighboring countries.

Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, said that officials ordered more than 100 staffers, along with eight experts from the regional office in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, to Guinea to help get control of the outbreak.

“Our collective, quick action is crucial to averting an uncontrolled spread of Ebola amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already pushed health workers and health facilities to the edge,” Moeti said. “We’ve learned the hard lessons of history, and we know with Ebola and other health emergencies preparedness works. It’s act now or pay later in lives lost and economies ruined.”