INTERVIEW - WHO plans to head off more African Ebola outbreaks
Date: 14-May-02
Country: COTE D'IVOIRE
Author: Alistair Thomson
The Geneva-based WHO said last week that the Ebola outbreak which began late last year in a remote corner of rainforest spanning Gabon and the Republic of Congo was now over.
One of the most virulent diseases known to man, Ebola kills up to 90 percent of people it infects by bleeding them to death and has no known vaccine or cure.
"We have to strengthen and integrate our systems of surveillance," WHO scientist Pierre Formenty told Reuters in a phone interview. "It's a challenge, that is clear. It will be very difficult, but we have to do it."
Health workers sent to help combat the outbreak met with opposition from local people, who objected to bans on handling dead bodies, preventing them carrying out traditional burial rites. They were also upset about a ban on eating apes, which carry the disease and are a delicacy in the area.
An international medical team was forced to leave the affected area at one point due to local hostility.
"It's the first time we have had a population like this which refuses (our assistance)," Formenty said in the interview on Friday. "We have to approach them before the next epidemic occurs... We need to develop health systems and at the same time education."
Ebola fever, which is also found in Asian jungles, was first discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire, in 1976 and named after a river there.
Since then there have been a series of outbreaks in central Africa, the worst in Zaire in 1995 when nearly 250 people died.
Formenty said it was hard to say if outbreaks were becoming more common, or simply better publicised and documented.
"That's the million dollar question...but in my opinion, they are becoming more frequent."
Formenty said the WHO would organise a meeting in the coming months with health officials from countries regularly affected by Ebola, and would ask anthropologists to assist them in overcoming the opposition of local people to their controls.
Gabon has banned hunting and eating of all apes to cut the risk of more outbreaks. Public Health Minister Faustin Boukoubi said on Friday the hastily-created Ebola monitoring system would become a permanent institution to head off future outbreaks.
But Formenty said conflicts, as in the Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo, were hampering WHO efforts, as was the lack of basic health services in remote areas
(Additional reporting by Antoine Lawson in Libreville).
