Ebola rumours in DRC are stopping people seeking treatment, WHO official says

Health authorities in Kenya have confirmed another case of Ebola just a week after the country recorded its first ever death from the virus. The health ministry says the latest patient is a close family member of the first case. He was already in quarantine when he developed symptoms and was immediately isolated. The ministry says 108 people are in quarantine, but there's no evidence of wider community transmission. But Dr. Catherine Smallwood is the World Health organization's incident manager for the ebola response in democratic republic of congo and she joins us live right now thank you so much for joining us doctor well what is going on why do people come out with these rumors in the first place which is preventing them to seek help i think the the rumors that are circulating and and that were um evoked in your report are very real and we must take them very very seriously and they're they're they're based in in some level of reality. Ebola is a very dangerous disease that kills, but the message is that it kills much more effectively if someone doesn't get treatment at the Ebola treatment centre. The lethality is much lower when people do seek care. So this is the message that we need to pass to communities. We also need to pass the message to communities that their traditional systems are functioning and are not going to put them at risk. So they should be frequenting their health centres, they should be taking their children to doctors for their routine immunisations, for any care at hospital level. So as you can tell, this Ebola outbreak has much wider implications on health than just Ebola. Why is it so difficult to get that message through? Because people see their family members, their members of the community dying because Ebola is such a severe disease that there are a lot of deaths. And that causes a lot of concern. At the beginning of the outbreak, there were not the right treatment centres available. So people who went for treatment were being treated under conditions that were less than perfect. over the past four months that has improved very very significantly and there's still a lot of work to be done to provide this level of treatment the optimized care for Ebola patients to the communities where the Ebola cases are happening the challenge is that the virus moves extremely quickly so a hot spot today might not be a hot spot tomorrow so our response over seven provinces of the DRC needs to be agile enough to move quickly and provide the level of care to the patients that need them. Dr. Smallwood, you know, we've got the headline number of over 9,000, but many say that's a huge underestimate. What is the real number? It's hard to say what the real number is. And the current case fatality rate has come down over time to around 48 percent. It was much higher in the first few months of the outbreak. And that's much more in line with what we would expect to see. So we are confident that although there is still undetected transmission, what we're able to capture now is much more of the real perspective and we have a much better understanding right now than we did a couple of months ago around where the outbreak is spreading what communities are being affected and what the hot spots are so our our confidence in the numbers now over the past two months is much more significant and and doctor when one looks at a possible cure. Of course, prevention is much better. How close are we to a vaccine for this particular strain of Ebola? We're looking forward to the vaccines that have been specifically developed for the Bundibugyo strain to arrive in the country in the next weeks. Once the vaccines arrive and all preparations are being made at the national level, we will start the Tumaini trial. The Tamani trial is the Swahili word for hope. There's a lot of hope that these vaccines will be effective. In the meantime, we are also experimentally using the vaccine for the Zaire strain of the virus. And we're using that in frontline workers. So people who are treating patients, people who are conducting burials. and we're hoping that we can collect the data on the Zaire strain vaccine so that we can see whether there's protection from that vaccine as well. But in the meantime, we do know that without a preventive vaccine, we can still stop this outbreak. And that's been clear because in the very first big hotspots that this outbreak was transmitting in, our response led by the national team has had a very dramatic impact. And the hotspots that we're seeing now are not in those areas where we saw the initial outbreak happening. Dr. Catherine Smallwood, thank you so much from the World Health Organization.