The Ebola superhighway: Why the new outbreak terrifies public health authorities
BY REID WILSON
TheHill.com
05/19/18
A new outbreak of the Ebola virus that has killed at least two dozen people has set public health officials scrambling to contain the epidemic as it threatens to spread far beyond the remote jungles of the Congo River Basin — and raises new questions about the World Health Organization’s (WHO) preparations for the next killer virus.
The U.S. government is preparing its most direct response yet to the outbreak that appears to have begun in April, readying staffers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to deploy to multiple communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Ministry of Health officials first identified cases of viral hemorrhagic fever when it reached the town of Bikoro earlier this month. On Thursday, officials said a new case had been identified in Mbandaka, a city of 1.2 million.
The new case in Mbandaka has raised the alarm among public health officials because it is the first time the virus has ever landed in a city that sits directly on the Congo River.
In all eight of the previous known Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the virus has been contained within remote jungle villages or relatively small towns, where isolated populations are less likely to spread the disease.
But the Congo River is effectively the region’s highway system. Barges and boats travel from Kisangani in the east through major cities including Bumba, Mbandaka — and eventually Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC and home to more than 11 million people, as well as Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo.
“The Congo River connects three national capitals and multiple other large cities,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as head of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the 2014-2015 outbreak. “The fact that there are now several cases in an urban center of more than a million people underscores the potential for this outbreak to get out of control.”
If the Ebola virus traveled upriver from Bikoro to Mbandaka, some officials wonder, has it also traveled downstream toward Kinshasa, which offers direct air traffic to cities including Brussels, Paris, Dubai and Lagos, Nigeria?
“We don’t know what’s happening along the river, because the river is used by a lot of barges,” said Pierre Rollin, one of the world’s leading experts on the Ebola virus at the CDC. “None of the outbreaks have been by the river or in the big towns. So we have a lot of caution before claiming we know what’s going on.”
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