Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Public health bodies struggle to keep up with the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded, Addis Ababa holds a highly anticipated Ethiopian national dialogue, and Nigeria announces plans to take greater ownership of its domestic humanitarian response.
The Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is the fastest-growing outbreak of the disease ever recorded—and according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the epidemic is now “outpacing” response efforts.
The Congolese government has confirmed 2,473 cases, including more than 1,000 deaths, since the outbreak was first reported in May. Health officials think the number could be four times higher. Ebola has occurred intermittently in Africa since 1976, but the 2013-16 outbreak, previously considered the worst on record, took eight months to reach 1,000 deaths.
More than 80 percent of new Ebola cases are being found outside of known transmission chains. “About two-thirds of deaths are occurring in communities, among people who never receive care in a health facility,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned last week. This makes it harder to enforce safe burials and funerals to stop disease spread.
