The number of confirmed deaths in the growing Ebola outbreak in central Africa has climbed above 200, officials said on June 18.
Congolese authorities have confirmed 232 deaths, Dr. Samuel Kamba, Congo’s health minister, told reporters during a briefing. Seventy-eight people have recovered from Ebola, or had two tests that came back negative.
Uganda has previously confirmed two deaths among people infected with Ebola.
Congo had previously confirmed 196 deaths as of June 15.
The number of deaths now represents about a quarter of the people with confirmed infections in Congo, Kamba said.
The outbreak was detected in mid-May in Congo, a country of about 116 million people in central Africa.
The outbreak is believed to be wider than the official figures, in part because authorities struggled to identify Ebola cases in the spring. That happened because early tests were unable to detect the Bundibugyo virus, the ebolavirus behind the outbreak, officials have said.
That virus has only been linked to two previous outbreaks: a 2007 outbreak in Uganda and a 2012 outbreak in Congo.
Kamba said that there are about 6,000 people who were identified as being exposed to Ebola, and that the rate of follow-up with those people was 71 percent—well below the goal of 95 percent.
To cut the chain of transmission, at least 90 percent of contacts must be followed up with, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Wessam Mankoula, an epidemiologist with the organization, told reporters in a separate briefing on Thursday that difficulties include conflict in areas where the outbreak is spreading.
“Our team cannot go and have more case investigation to identify the possible context for those cases,” he said.
Funding from the United States and other countries will be used to address the outbreak, including testing and contact tracing, the Africa CDC said.
Dr. Satish Pillai, who is leading the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Ebola response, said in a call on Thursday that the agency’s focus is on controlling the outbreak and “ensuring our domestic readiness to respond in the unlikely event of cases” domestically, which has not happened as of yet.
World Health Organization officials said Friday that health workers have been among the deceased.
Seventy-five medics have been confirmed to have contracted Ebola in the outbreak, and 17 died, the WHO’s emergency director, Marie Roseline Belizaire, told a briefing in Geneva via video from Bunia.
“At the starting [sic] of the outbreak, health care workers were the first to be infected,” she said. “And actually I met with [the fourth survivor] from this outbreak and when they are explaining to you how they live it, how they were infected it’s really, it can break your heart.”