WHO chief says he's 'deeply concerned about the scale and speed' of the Ebola outbreak in Africa as cases top 500 and deaths hit triple digits

The outbreak, traced to the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus (6), was first reported in the Ituri province of the DRC. It's since reached Uganda, where one infected traveler died in Kampala. An American physician working in Bunia, Peter Stafford, has also tested positive and is being evacuated to Germany for treatment, according to STAT News (7).

A rare strain

First identified during a 2007 outbreak in western Uganda (8), the Bundibugyo strain is one of four ebolavirus species known to infect humans and has surfaced in only a handful of outbreaks. Its case fatality rate runs between 30% and 50% — lower than the more familiar Zaire strain (9), which can kill up to 90% of those infected — but its rarity comes with its own kind of danger, in that there are no approved vaccines or therapies for Bundibugyo, and standard rapid-field tests can miss it entirely.

A WHO expert panel met Tuesday to weigh whether Merck's Ervebo, the first FDA-approved Ebola vaccine that's shown partial protection against Bundibugyo in non-human primates (10), can be ethically deployed in the current outbreak. In 2019, Ervebo showed 100% protection (11) against the Zaire ebolavirus strain.

For some historical context, this is the 17th outbreak in the DRC since the virus was first identified in 1976, according to the WHO (12). Looking at Ebola more broadly, the world's deadliest outbreak (13), which affected West Africa and ended in 2016, killed more than 11,000 people and resulted in tens of billions in damages. The second-largest outbreak (14) in history, an epidemic in the DRC between 2018 and 2020, led to over 2,000 deaths.

U.S. taking measures

Markets so far are taking the news in stride, even though the DRC produces roughly three-quarters of the world's mined cobalt and around 14% of global copper (15). Copper futures have retreated modestly (16) as of Tuesday morning, but the material has already been in a tightened cycle.

The U.S. is already clamping down on the spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday invoked Title 42 (17), the same public-health authority used during the COVID-19 pandemic, to bar non-U.S. passport holders who have been in DRC, Uganda or South Sudan in the past 21 days. U.S. embassies in Kampala and Kinshasa have paused visa services (18).

Mind you, the U.S. is doing all of this independently from WHO, as Trump withdrew from the organization in January, citing what the administration called the WHO's mishandling of COVID-19 and "unfairly onerous payments" (19).

Article Sources

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The New York Times (1); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2),(6),(17); World Health Organization (3),(4),(14); Africa CDC (5); STAT News (7),(10); CEPI (8); National Library of Medicine (9); U.S. Food and Drug Administration (11); CNN (12); World Bank (13); London Commodity Brokers (15); Investing.com (16); U.S. Department of State (18); The White House (19)