Nearly 90% of DRC Ebola Contacts Untraceable-CDC

The Ebola Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak in Uganda and the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo remains far from being contained due to major gaps in contact tracing systems, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) has warned.

Speaking to journalists during a press conference, Dr Jean Kaseya, the Director-General of the Africa CDC, said only seventeen percent of the contacts of positive cases in the DRC have been identified and are being followed up, warning that this shows there still exists a huge risk of transmission in the community.

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The World Health Organization guidelines require all potential contacts of Ebola cases to be identified, monitored for 21 days, and promptly isolated if symptoms develop as an effective way of preventing further spread of the lethal disease, but Kaseya says while twenty-four thousand contacts are expected to be under follow-up, only six thousand twenty-two are currently being followed up.

Worse, he said, they know there are confirmed cases in the community who have not yet been identified for treatment.
By Monday, the country had confirmed a total of 782 cases and 181 confirmed deaths in an outbreak declared in May. Comparatively, the Congolese medical doctor revealed, Uganda is doing quite well with 792 contacts currently under follow-up. He said the country, which has so far had nineteen confirmed cases and no new cases recorded in the last ten days, has followed up on ninety-one percent of the contacts expected.

Locally in Uganda, the Ministry of Health has reaffirmed to the public that the outbreak is well under control nationally. Dr Daniel Kyabayinze, the Director of Public Health in the Ministry of Health, said the country has no evidence of community transmission, as the majority of the cases that were confirmed in Uganda were Congolese nationals who came to seek care.

Indeed, two of the deaths Uganda has recorded are of Congolese nationals. Even among the ten who are currently being isolated for treatment in Uganda are imported cases from the neighboring country. Now, Kaseya says, to say that the outbreak is under control, the DRC needs to first be able to trace at least forty percent of its contacts.

He further says, their analysis has found the current outbreak involving the Bundibugyo strain has been five times worse than the similar strain outbreak in Uganda in 2012 and seventeen times worse than the first Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak in DRC in 2012, where about 59 cases were recorded.