Congo’s Ebola deaths top 1,000

Health workers transport Ebola patient in Congo from ambulance

(Image credit: Benediction Murhabazi / AFP via Getty Images)

What happened

More than 1,000 people have died of Ebola in Congo, in the fastest-growing outbreak on record, African health officials said Wednesday. Congo’s Ministry of Health said 2,536 cases have been reported since this outbreak was declared May 15. There are no approved vaccines or treatments for the Bundibugyo virus responsible for the outbreak.

“These are people dying” because “we don’t have vaccines, we don’t have medicine, we don’t have funding,” Dr. Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a health summit in Ghana. In the worst outbreak to date, which killed more than 11,000 people between 2013 and 2016, it “took about eight months from the first case to reach 1,000 deaths,” The Associated Press said. The current outbreak in Congo appears to be “spreading faster than health officials can track it.”

An Ebola vaccine from Merck licensed to target the Zaire virus could also offer some protection against the Bundibugyo species, according to a paper published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The World Health Organization has “expressed lukewarm support” for testing the vaccine in Congo, Stat News said, but Bundibugyo-specific vaccines are “still months away” from clinical trials.