GENEVA, Switzerland(AFP)—The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is moving faster than any previous epidemic of the disease and risks spreading to more countries, the head of the World Health Organization warned Tuesday.

“We must be frank: the epidemic is far from being under control,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told an emergency meeting on the outbreak.

“It had a big head start, and we are still playing catch-up.”

His comment came after the DRC on Monday said the outbreak had killed more than 2,300 people out of nearly 5,000 cases, making it the deadliest in the country’s history.

Declared on May 15, the DRC’s 17th Ebola outbreak is thought to have already been spreading for several weeks by that point.

It has hit regions in the north and east where the presence of the state is weak, health infrastructure is largely lacking and myriad armed groups have roamed for decades.

The outbreak “is being fuelled by insecurity and displacement, and intense population movement along roads, rivers and mining routes”, Tedros said, according to a transcript of his remarks.

He called for governments to cooperate in fighting the outbreak, and said new recommendations would be issued to DRC and other countries at risk in the coming days.

– Unprecedented speed –

The virus, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids and causes a haemorrhagic fever, “is moving faster than any previous Ebola outbreak”, he warned.

Three months after it was declared, seven times more cases and five times more deaths were recorded in the DRC than during the first three months of the largest Ebola outbreak in history, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

That outbreak hit west Africa in 2013-2016, killing more than 11,300 people, mainly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

A 2018-2020 outbreak in the DRC, previously considered the country’s deadliest, killed 2,299 people out of 3,381 confirmed cases, according to WHO figures based on Congolese data.

Tuesday marked the second meeting of the WHO emergency committee since it declared on May 17 the outbreak a so-called Public Health Emergency of International Concern — its second-highest alert level.

It remained unclear when the committee would release its recommendations.

Currently, the United Nations health agency assesses the public health risk level at “very high” at the national level in the DRC, “high” for Uganda and other bordering nations, and “low” for the rest of Africa and the world.

– High risk of spread –

Cases have so far been reported in six DRC provinces, including near the border with South Sudan, as well as in neighbouring Uganda.

“The risk of further national and international spread remains high,” Tedros warned.

No specific vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain behind the current surge of Ebola, although clinical trials are underway.

The WHO chief said that what concerned him most was “where people are dying: at home, in their communities, outside treatment centres, and outside known contact lists”.

“Every death like that points to a chain of transmission we have not yet found,” he said, warning that “until every chain is found and broken, the epidemic will continue”.

The wariness in communities explained “the rise in cases and in deaths over the past three or four weeks,” Dieudonne Mwamba, head of the DRC’s Institute of Public Health (INSP), told AFP. Addressing that would require “other strategies”, he said.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, WHO expert Thierno Balde described efforts to ramp up and decentralise the response to bring it closer to communities where the virus is spreading.

Among other things, he said the organisation was striving to better protect motorcycle taxi drivers who transport patients, and integrate them into the surveillance system.

“WHO and partners aim to see an impact of the scale up in the next months but cannot put a timeline on when the epidemic will be brought under control,” he told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Bunia.