It’s the nightmare scenario health officials dread — and in eastern DRC, it’s getting worse fast.

This is a big one, and it’s moving quickly.

The World Health Organisation has put out an urgent SOS: it needs 5,000 extra health workers, right now, to stop Ebola from tearing through the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The numbers are sobering. The outbreak was only officially detected in mid-May, but it has already spread to six provinces in the country’s east and north-east — areas where conflict has raged for decades.

Citing official figures from Kinshasa, the WHO said that since 15 May, more than 6,600 people have been confirmed infected and 3,175 people have died. That’s a case fatality rate of close to 48%.

And the health system simply cannot cope. As cbinews.reports, clinics are overwhelmed, understaffed and under-resourced for a virus this contagious and this brutal. Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids and can cause severe internal and external bleeding and organ failure.

So, what’s the plan?

The WHO wants to create 3,000 beds in dedicated Ebola treatment centres across the DRC. With three medical staff needed for every single patient, that means training 9,000 health workers in total.

“We have made extraordinary progress,” senior WHO technical official Luca Fontana told a press briefing in Geneva this week, as reported by cbinews.tv.

“More than 900 beds have been built within the first two months of the response, and we have now reached close to 1,400 beds across 59 treatment centres,” he said.

But it’s not enough.

“Despite this extraordinary effort, we estimate that another 1,600 beds will be required to meet the rapidly growing needs,” Fontana added. “Right now we have nearly 4,000 healthcare workers currently working inside the treatment centres. So, it means we need 5,000 more.”

The Congolese health ministry is now scrambling to find qualified staff in other, safer regions and deploy them to the hotspots.

“The problem is to identify those fast enough to make sure that we can cover the growing need,” Fontana explained. “Every treatment centre that is fully staffed and functional means more lives saved and a stronger chance of bringing this outbreak under control.”

Why this outbreak is so worrying

There are a couple of reasons alarm bells are ringing.

First, the strain. This epidemic is caused by the Bundibugyo ebolavirus. Unlike the more common Zaire strain, there is currently no approved vaccine or treatment for Bundibugyo — though several are being tested. That makes containment much harder.

Second, the location. As cbinews.tv notes, this is hitting regions in the north and east where state presence is weak, health infrastructure is patchy at best, and dozens of armed groups operate. Reaching patients is dangerous, and trust in outsiders is low.

And third, the spread. In the early weeks, most patients were coming from Bunia, the capital of Ituri province. Now, Fontana said, sick people are arriving from villages “far beyond” the epicentre. That’s a clear sign the outbreak is no longer contained.

Putting it in context

Ebola has haunted Africa for nearly 50 years since it was first identified near the Ebola River in DRC in 1976. In that time, it has killed more than 15,000 people across the continent.

The deadliest outbreak in history was in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, which killed 11,310 people, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

For DRC itself, this is already bigger than its notorious 2018-2020 outbreak in Kivu and Ituri, which killed nearly 2,300 of the 3,500 people infected and was the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded.

If the current figures hold, this new outbreak would be DRC’s deadliest yet.

Source: cbinews.tv.

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