The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is worrying.
It has spread for weeks undetected in a part of the world where civil war makes it difficult to contain the virus, and the strain of Ebola involved is rare, so there are fewer tools to stop a virus that kills between a third and half of people infected.
This is a critical moment in an outbreak where there is uncertainty about how far it has spread, but there are already almost 250 suspected cases and 80 deaths.
Most Ebola outbreaks tend to be small, but experts are concerned about the 2014-16 outbreak. Then, 28,600 people in West Africa were infected in the largest outbreak of the disease ever.
The declaration of a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) does not mean that we are in the early stages of a Covid-style pandemic.
The risk that Ebola poses to the world remains low. Even in the 2014-16 outbreak, there were only three cases in the UK, and all were healthcare workers who had volunteered to help.
“But this reflects that the situation is complex enough to require international coordination,” says Dr. Amanda Rojek, from the Institute of Pandemic Sciences at the University of Oxford.
t7 live
