WHO prepares for potential Ebola resurgence during West African rainy season

While new Ebola cases in West Africa generally continue to decline, WHO officials said the organization will remain vigilant as it prepares for the rainy season.

“In terms of the Ebola epidemic, it is not finished; the job is not done,” Bruce Aylward, MD, WHO assistant director-general for emergencies, said during a media briefing this week. “I think there was a new statistic as of today that highlights [this fact]: the inexorable increase in cases has continued to pass new thresholds, and today we’ve just gone over 27,000 reported cases.

“When you look at the case numbers today, [Guinea and Sierra Leone are] where Liberia was in January. It took Liberia 4 months to get from those numbers to zero, and to be able to say it had secured zero on May 9. Liberia was not dealing with the rainy season, they were not dealing with a substantial portion of cases arising off the contact list or from deaths in the communities. They also were not dealing with the challenge of a looming presidential election as they will be in Guinea very soon.”

Bruce Aylward

These factors may be enough to change the “best case scenario” of having no reported cases of Ebola in Guinea and Sierra Leone by the end of September, to a more realistic goal of achieving this status by year’s end, Aylward said.

There were 12 reported cases of Ebola in West Africa for the week ending May 24 — nine in Guinea and three in Sierra Leone. This is a significant decrease from the 36 reported cases the week before, Aylward said, noting that those cases were confined to five districts.

“We’ve been dealing with six or fewer districts, or prefectures, with active transmission for a month now,” he said. “That’s the lowest number of infected areas we’ve been dealing with for a full year, so there has been some real progress. The vast majority of these countries now have been Ebola-free — most districts or prefectures — for more than 42 days.”

WHO unveiled several initiatives at the World Health Assembly this week to combat Ebola, including a plan to establish a $100 million contingency fund to finance in-field operations for up to 3 months. The 2-year pilot program will be evaluated when the initial term is complete, according to a WHO press release. – by David Jwanier