The director-general of the World Health Organization is “really worried” about the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, already the third largest on record.
In an exclusive interview with STAT, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the conditions he saw after returning from his second visit to the affected area since the outbreak was declared on May 15, and designated a public health emergency of international concern on May 17. Already there have been at least 708 confirmed cases combined in the two countries, 141 of whom have died.
WHO staff in the field in the DRC have faced death threats. Surveillance of contacts of cases remains well off what is needed to contain an outbreak — on June 11, only 28.4% of the contacts of known cases had been followed up. People on the ground told the WHO leader they either don’t believe Ebola exists, or that it isn’t one of their top concerns.
“When the community is not taking it as its priority, it’s very hard,’’ Tedros said in a rare one-on-one interview with STAT.
He recalled a discussion he had with some community leaders who pressed him on why the world only cares about their region when there is an Ebola outbreak underway. With long-standing conflict, hundreds of thousands of displaced people, widespread hunger, and a multitude of diseases that kill more frequently than Ebola does, the conclusion some have reached is that the rest of the world only cares because it’s afraid Ebola will spread beyond the DRC’s borders.
