The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) raised its response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to its highest level on Friday but said the risk of the disease spreading in the US remained low.
The move, reserved for the most severe health crises, signals growing concern over the rare strain’s rapid spread.
The outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola has infected more than 1,200 people in the DRC, including 321 deaths, and 20 cases in neighbouring Uganda, reaching the highest first-month total of any episode of the disease, the World Health Organisation said this week.
The CDC raised its emergency activation to Level 1, its most severe designation, which is reserved for critical emergencies and assigns the largest number of staff possible to work the response.
Previous Level 1 responses include Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 2009-2010 swine flu outbreak, the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the 2016-2017 Zika virus outbreak.
The CDC has deployed 19 staff members overseas so far to assist its country teams with the response on the ground, Dr Satish Pillai, the incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response, said in a briefing.
They are assisting more than 125 people already on the ground as part of the DRC and Uganda country offices and the health ministries in both countries with data analysis, exit screenings at airports, laboratory support, and training, he said.
The CDC is also providing financial resources to partners on the ground and has trained 25 local field epidemiologists who can operate in areas that its staff cannot access, Pillai said.
The agency said last week it would make available $107m (R1.76bn) in emergency funding to strengthen its response efforts.
The White House is seeking more than $1.4bn (R23.06bn) in new funds from Congress to address the widening outbreak, including $800m (R13.18bn) for a quarantine centre in Kenya for Americans exposed to the virus, a Trump administration official told Reuters on Thursday.
The US is sending doses of an experimental Ebola treatment to Africa and preparing to deploy 2,500 diagnostic tests to help contain the outbreak, health officials said on Friday.
Reuters
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