The United Nations Emergency Ebola Response Coordinator, David Gressly, on Wednesday (25 Sep) said the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is at “a more promising place than we certainly were a few months ago, when we saw a number of attacks against Ebola responders, particularly in the city of Butembo.”
Gressly, interviewed by UN News in New York, said “things have advanced” and “not only is there greater security for responders in Butembo, outside of Butembo and Beni there are a lot of areas that were inaccessible in the past, where a lot of ground is being done to try to gain community acceptance for the response, which has had a very positive impact.”
He added that “getting into areas where the virus is circulating on a regular basis has allowed an effective response to follow and we are seeing that cases decline, in some cases dramatically.”
The Response Coordinator explained that Beni and Butembo have very large and mobile populations, making it necessary to have “good preparedness around the border areas; good preparedness in provinces adjacent in case the virus gets into that area.”
He said, “let’s just dry up the source of the virus in that central area that’s been feeding into the Ugandan border, feeding into Goma, and then the threat will go down considerably.”
As more than 10,000 people have been immunized against the Ebola virus, Gressly said, “vaccination by itself is probably not sufficient to end the epidemic. It can put a break on the spread, slow it down, but, in itself is probably not going to stop the epidemic.”
He said, “the best use of the vaccine is a constantly evolving question. How best to utilize that? which populations are at a greater risk?”
Gressly said, “bit by bit we are making Ebola into a more normalized disease. And ultimately, what we would like to see is that the Ebola treatment centres themselves be seen as a place where you go to get cured of Ebola, not die of Ebola, which is often the perception. That totally turns and transforms the psychological aspect of Ebola as a disease.”
Latest figures show that more than 2,100 lives have been lost to the haemorrhagic fever since August last year, with 57 new cases recorded in the week up to 19 September; although around 1,000 have recovered from the disease, with more than 3,150 cases overall~UNIFEED / UNICEF / WHO / WFP
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