The number of deaths due to Ebola reached 131 people, WHO is worried about the scale and speed of the epidemic

JAKARTA - The World Health Organization (WHO) expressed concern on Tuesday over the "scale and speed" of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which has killed about 131 people.

The WHO has declared the surge in cases of highly contagious Ebola as an international health emergency and held an emergency meeting on the crisis on Tuesday.

There is no vaccine or therapeutic treatment available for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola responsible for the latest outbreak of the disease, which has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the last half-century.

With new outbreaks largely concentrated in hard-to-reach areas wracked by protracted conflict, few samples have been tested in laboratories and the figures are largely based on suspected cases.

"We have recorded about 131 deaths in total and we have about 513 suspected cases," Congo Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba said on national television on Tuesday morning, launching Daily Sabah from AFP (19/5).

"The deaths we are reporting are all deaths that we have identified in the community, without having to say that they are all related to Ebola," he added.

The previous figure from the outbreak, which was announced last weekend in the eastern part of the country, recorded a total of 91 deaths from 350 suspected cases.

Meanwhile, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the decision to assign the second highest level of alert under international health regulations was not taken "lightly."

"I am very concerned about the scale and speed of this epidemic," he told the World Health Organization's decision-making body at its annual meeting in Geneva on Tuesday.

It is known that the center of the Ebola outbreak is currently in the northeastern Ituri Province on the border with Uganda and South Sudan.

As a gold mining hub, the area is frequently travelled by people and has been plagued by clashes between local militias for years.

The virus has spread to neighboring provinces and crossed the DRC border into Uganda.

"Unfortunately, the warning was slow to spread in the community, because people thought it was a mystical disease, and as a result, sick people were not taken to the hospital," said Kamba.

The outbreak is the 17th in the vast central African country of more than 100 million people.

The vaccine is only available for the Zaire strain of the disease, which has caused the largest outbreak ever recorded.

The WHO said it was investigating whether there were vaccine or treatment candidates that could be used to control this new surge.

The Bundibugyo strain had previously caused outbreaks in Uganda in 2007 and in the DRC in 2012. Its mortality rate is 30 to 50 percent.

Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi on Tuesday urged citizens to remain "calm" and take precautions, his office said in a post on X, adding that President Tshisekedi had asked the government to step up its response to the outbreak.

First identified in 1976 and believed to have originated in bats, Ebola is a deadly viral disease spread through direct contact with bodily fluids. The disease can cause massive bleeding and organ failure.

The deadliest Ebola outbreak in the DRC claimed nearly 2,300 lives out of 3,500 cases between 2018 and 2020.