The World Health Organization said on Wednesday there were 600 suspected cases of Ebola and 139 suspected deaths and numbers are expected to rise given the time the virus circulated before the outbreak in Congo and Uganda was detected.
A WHO Emergency Committee met on Tuesday in Geneva and confirmed the latest Ebola outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus was a public health emergency of international concern but not a pandemic emergency, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“The WHO assess the risk of the epidemic as high at the national and regional levels and low at the global level,” Tedros said.
He declared the emergency at the weekend, and he said it was the first time a WHO chief had taken that step without first consulting experts, due to the urgency of the situation.
“Our absolute priority now is to identify all the existing chains of transmission … that will then enable us to really define the scale of the outbreak and be able to provide care,” Chikwe Ihekweazu, WHO emergencies chief, told the same press conference.
