The latest Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be a test of the world’s ability to contain the disease, according to an article on the STAT website.
Like an outbreak earlier this year in the western part of the country, disease transmission is taking place in cities where hundreds of thousands of people live.
The current outbreak is occurring in a conflict zone, with more than 1 million displaced people, armed combatant groups, and “red zones” where outsiders hoping to contain a deadly disease may not be able to travel, the article said.
“That’s really the worst-case scenario: That we can’t get in quickly enough to an alert [of possible cases] or we just have a blind spot because of security. And then an outbreak really begins to take hold in those blind spots and becomes a multicountry regional outbreak,’’ Dr. Peter Salama, the World Health Organization’s deputy director-general of emergency preparedness and response, told STAT.
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