Earlier this week, my colleague Mary Chastain reported that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak in Congo and Uganda a global health emergency due to 300 cases and 88 deaths.
There have been some fascinating developments related to that announcement. To begin with, NPR is reporting that this particular strain of Ebola is problematic because it lacks treatments, and the case numbers may be larger than reported.
First, this strain does not have vaccines or specific treatments.Second, this outbreak took a while to detect and has already crossed borders and spread to several big cities, including to Kampala, the capital of neighboring Uganda, and to the regional hub of Goma in the DRC.”To discover so many patients in so many different cities and towns so far away from each other, it tells me this has been going on for a while,” says Bhadelia. “In many cases, when patients passed away their bodies were transported back to the homeland as would be expected culturally to be buried in their homeland.” She worries about how those bodies were handled and whether more people were exposed to the virus in that process.Third, the case count is growing rapidly and a lot of the tests are coming back positive for Ebola, suggesting the outbreak may be far bigger than what’s been detected.
Presently, there are 600 cases being reported, with 139 deaths. Two Americans have been flown to facilities in Europe for monitoring after being exposed to the pathogen.
Meanwhile, an American missionary who contracted the virus while treating patients in Congo has been admitted to a specialist hospital in Germany, that country’s health ministry told NBC News on Wednesday.Dr. Peter Stafford, 39, is now at Berlin’s Charité hospital, where he is being treated in an isolation ward in the department of Infectious Diseases and Intensive Care Medicine, the ministry said. He had unknowingly operated on a patient with Ebola before the outbreak was detected, according to leaders of Serge, the Christian missionary group he works for.Also flown to Germany were his wife, Rebekah Stafford, 38, who is also a doctor and treated the same patient, as well as their four young children, Serge said Wednesday.Another physician, Patrick LaRochelle, 46, is thought to have been exposed through a second patient and is being flown from Congo to Bulovka Hospital, in the Czech capital Prague, according to Serge.
Congo has canceled a three-day World Cup preparation training camp in the capital, Kinshasa, due to the Ebola outbreak.
Congo are scheduled to play World Cup-warmup games against Denmark in Liege, Belgium on June 3 and Chile in southern Spain on June 9. Both matches are going ahead as planned, team spokesman Jerry Kalemo told The Associated Press on Wednesday.”There were three stages of preparation: in Kinshasa to say goodbye to the public, Belgium and Spain with two friendly matches against Denmark in Liege and Chile in Spain, and the third stage from June 11 in Houston, United States. Only one stage was cancelled — the one in Kinshasa,” Kalemo said.All of the Congo players and the team’s French coach, Sébastien Desabre, are based outside of the central African country with most of them playing in France.
Finally, and laughably, The New York Times and other “news” organizations are blaming the U.S. and its gutting of USAID and leaving the WHO for this particular outbreak.
The Ebola crisis in East Africa is rapidly escalating, with cases now confirmed in major population centers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Public health experts around the world and health workers on the ground say that the response has been significantly hindered by the near-absence so far of the United States, historically the leader in any major outbreak.The United States used to fund robust disease surveillance networks across the region and maintained emergency teams to take charge in public health crises like this one. Much of that work ended with the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development early last year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also lost hundreds of experts, including some in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who could have helped contain the epidemic.Epidemiologists and others who worked on previous Ebola outbreaks say that the fact that this one came to international attention weeks, or perhaps months, after it began and had already spread across international borders, is a direct result of the weakened surveillance.American officials did not learn of the outbreak until Thursday, nine days after the World Health Organization did, and almost a month after the first person died. The delay in confirming the outbreak was in part because samples were taken to the national lab in Kinshasa, Congo, at the wrong temperature. That task previously would have been managed by U.S.A.I.D.
If this particular outbreak underscores anything, it is that while Ebola deserves serious attention, the now-predictable cycle of media amplification and narrative-building is already in full swing.
We have seen this movie before, most recently with the breathless hantavirus coverage that generated far more anxiety than actual risk to the broader public.
A dangerous, poorly tracked outbreak in Central Africa is not trivial, but neither is it an excuse for speculative worst-case framing or politically convenient blame-shifting.
Clear-eyed reporting, grounded in facts rather than fear, would do far more to inform the public than the now-routine rush to manufacture urgency and assign culpability before the full picture is even known.
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