The infected patient had traveled by road from Guinea, arriving in the country’s largest city, Abidjan, on August 12. Shortly thereafter, he began experiencing a fever and was admitted for treatment at a local hospital, where collected samples revealed that he had Ebola virus disease. Earlier this year, Guinea had battled a four-month long Ebola outbreak, which had been declared over on June 19, 2021. So far, health authorities have found no indication that the current case is linked to the earlier outbreak in Guinea, but further investigation and genomic sequencing is underway to identify the strain and determine if there is a connection. “It is of immense concern that this outbreak has been declared in Abidjan, a metropolis of more than four million people,” said Matshidiso Moeti, MBBS, the WHO’s regional director for Africa. “However, much of the world’s expertise in tackling Ebola is here on the continent and Cote d’Ivoire [Ivory Coast] can tap into this experience and bring the response to full speed.” The WHO is taking immediate action, helping to coordinate cross-border Ebola response activities and transferring 5,000 Ebola vaccines doses (which the organization helped secure to fight the outbreak in Guinea) to Ivory Coast. The organization is also assisting with the ramp up of infection prevention and control of health facilities, diagnostics, contact tracing, treatment and reaching out to communities to ensure they take a key role in the response. “The biggest threat now is that globally public health systems have been decimated by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving them with too little staff and too few resources to respond to other challenges like outbreaks of severe diseases like Ebola,” said Jennifer Horney, PhD, professor of epidemiology and core faculty with the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware in Newark. Ebola virus disease (Ebola for short) is a contagious illness that is native to Africa. It can cause hemorrhagic fever — a serious condition that can lead to severe bleeding, organ failure, and death. Since Ebola was discovered in 1976, several outbreaks have occurred, primarily in Africa. The WHO called the 2014 outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa the “largest, most severe and most complex Ebola epidemic” in history — it infected more than 28,000 and took the lives of 11,000 people. Overall, 11 people were treated for Ebola in the United States during the 2014 to 2016 epidemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first treatment for Ebola virus in October 2020.
