KINSHASA, DR Congo (AFP)—The World Health Organization chief voiced concern on Tuesday about the “scale and speed” of an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has killed an estimated 131 people.

The WHO has declared the surge of the highly contagious haemorrhagic fever an international health emergency and called an emergency meeting on the crisis on Tuesday.

No vaccine or therapeutic treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola responsible for the latest outbreak of the disease, which has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the past half-century.

With the new outbreak largely concentrated in difficult-to-access areas hit by long-running conflicts, few samples have been laboratory-tested, and figures are based mostly on suspected cases.

“We have recorded roughly 131 deaths in total, and we have around 513 suspected cases,” Congolese Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba said on national television early Tuesday.

“The deaths we are reporting are all the deaths we have identified in the community, without necessarily saying that they are all linked to Ebola,” he added.

The previous figures from the outbreak, declared late last week in the country’s east, gave a total of 91 dead out of 350 suspected cases.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the decision to declare the second-highest level of alert under international health regulations was not taken “lightly”.

“I’m deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic,” he told the annual meeting of the health agency’s decision-taking body in Geneva on Tuesday.

The epicentre is in northeastern Ituri province on the border with Uganda and South Sudan.

As a gold-mining hub, it sees people regularly crisscrossing the region and has been plagued by clashes between local militias for years.

The virus has already spread into neighbouring provinces, as well as beyond the DRC’s borders into Uganda.

“Unfortunately, the alert was slow to circulate within the community, because people thought it was a mystical illness, and so, as a result, the sick were not taken to the hospital,” Kamba said.

– ‘Challenges’ –

The outbreak is the 17th in the vast central African country of more than 100 million people.

Vaccines are only available for the Zaire strain of the disease, which has caused the biggest recorded outbreaks.

The WHO said it was examining whether any candidate vaccines or treatments could be used to rein in the new surge.

The Bundibugyo strain has previously been responsible for outbreaks in Uganda in 2007 and in the DRC in 2012. The mortality rate was 30 to 50 percent.

Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi on Tuesday urged citizens to keep “calm” and take precautions, the presidency said on X, adding that Tshisekedi had asked the government to step up the response to the outbreak.

Suspected cases have been reported in the commercial hub of Butembo in neighbouring North Kivu province, some 200 kilometres (125 miles) from the epidemic’s ground zero, Kamba said, without giving further details.

Another case has been recorded in Goma, North Kivu’s key provincial capital currently under the control of the Rwanda-backed M23 armed group.

The front line dividing the anti-governmental group and government forces runs through the provinces of North Kivu and neighbouring South Kivu.

“Humanitarian access and coordination between the various stakeholders, particularly the parties to the conflict, could be one of the challenges for the response,” Francois Moreillon, of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the DRC, told AFP on Monday.

He called on the belligerents to guarantee effective access, cooperation and humanitarian coordination.

– US screening –

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) has declared the outbreak a continental public health emergency.

Tedros said that 30 cases had been confirmed to be Ebola in Ituri province.

“Uganda has also informed WHO of two confirmed cases in the capital of Kampala, including one death among two individuals who travelled from DRC,” he said.

Germany said on Tuesday it was readying to receive and treat a US citizen who has contracted the virus.

American Christian NGO Serge said the patient was a doctor for the organisation who was exposed to the virus through his work.

It said two other doctors with the NGO who treated sick people were asymptomatic.

The United States announced it was screening air passengers from outbreak-hit areas and temporarily suspending visa services.

First identified in 1976 and believed to have originated in bats, Ebola is a deadly viral disease spread through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can cause severe bleeding and organ failure.

The deadliest Ebola outbreak in the DRC claimed nearly 2,300 lives from 3,500 cases between 2018 and 2020.