Brazil investigates possible Ebola cases amid scramble to contain outbreak

The World Health Organization’s top doctor has traveled to the Ebola hot spot to help bring the unfolding crisis under control as authorities in Brazil said they were looking into two suspected cases.

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Meanwhile, the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid, relief and development nongovernmental organization, warned that the outbreak is likely significantly larger and more advanced than official figures suggest because of delayed detection and poor contact tracing.

“With only 20% of contacts currently being traced, health authorities are struggling to identify and isolate new chains of transmission,” it said in a statement Monday.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who traveled over the weekend to the capital of the eastern province of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and ground zero of the current outbreak, said those who contract the virus could survive the strain of the disease.

“Even without vaccines or specific therapeutics, people can survive Ebola disease caused by the Bundibugyo virus if they receive timely healthcare and seek treatment as soon as symptoms appear,” he said in a post on X on Monday after visiting a newly opened Ebola treatment facility in Bunia on Sunday.

On Sunday, WHO announced that four nurses who were being treated for Ebola have been discharged from a hospital in Bunia after recovering from the disease. A laboratory worker had also recovered earlier this week, the agency said, bringing the total number of people who have recovered from the virus in Congo to five.

In an op-ed in the Financial Times on Sunday, Dr. Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said more than 1,100 suspected cases are being investigated in Congo and neighboring Uganda as of Saturday, with the two countries having reported 263 confirmed cases and 43 confirmed deaths.

WHO reported the same number of confirmed deaths Sunday, but said there were 291 confirmed cases between Congo and Uganda. Those numbers stood at 128 confirmed cases and 18 deaths a week ago, according to the WHO tracker.

“We must move at the speed of the epidemic,” Kaseya wrote in the op-ed, adding that “the risk of regional spread is already happening.”

Health officials and medical workers are facing “persistent challenges” in containing the outbreak, a joint statement issued by the Congo government and WHO said, including early detection and isolation of cases, contact tracing, and safe and dignified burials of the victims.

Last month, WHO declared the outbreak caused by the rare Bundibugyo version of the virus in Congo and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern, although it does not meet the criteria of a pandemic emergency.

The outbreak, the third-largest since Ebola was discovered half a century ago, is outpacing the global response, as doctors in the region are playing catch-up, and fear and anger over the growing health crisis among local communities has at times turned violent.

“Never before has an Ebola outbreak recorded so many cases so soon after its declaration,” Doctors without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) said in a statement Saturday. “Like everyone in the affected areas, MSF teams are witnessing a response that has not yet caught up to the rapid spread of the epidemic,” the statement said, as it called for more medical staff and testing on the ground.

Meanwhile, health authorities thousands of miles away are probing whether the deadly strain had reached their shores.

In Brazil, a man with a suspected case of Ebola in Sao Paulo tested positive for meningitis. Another suspected case emerged in Rio de Janeiro, where the patient tested positive for malaria, local health authorities said Sunday. In neither case does the diagnosis rule out the possibility of Ebola, they said.

In Italy, protocols for a suspected case of Ebola were triggered in Sardinia’s capital, Cagliari, for a man who had flown back from Congo on Saturday with some symptoms, but the health ministry said Monday that he had tested negative.