In May, Africa CDC called an urgent meeting over an Ebola outbreak linked to 65 deaths. Next week it will hold an emergency Ebola meeting with the continent’s health ministers, and Congo’s death toll alone is now above 4,000.
Africa CDC, the African Union’s public health agency, announced the session from Addis Ababa on Wednesday. It came a day after Nigeria confirmed its first case of the Bundibugyo strain.
The emergency Ebola meeting will be held virtually on 28 October. Africa CDC says ministers will review the situation, tighten cross-border coordination and speed up support for affected countries. Their conclusions will feed into a summit of heads of state led by Burundi’s Évariste Ndayishimiye, the African Union chairperson.
“Ebola is crossing borders,” the agency said in its statement. Director General Jean Kaseya added that the response must move faster, with firmer political leadership.
The distance travelled since May is the real story. On 15 May, Africa CDC was reacting to 246 suspected cases in eastern Congo. Reuters now describes the outbreak as the second-largest Ebola epidemic on record, with more than 9,000 cases.
Africa CDC declared a continental emergency three days after that first call. Five months on, it is convening another emergency Ebola meeting. Kaseya said in late June that the virus was still outpacing the response, and the numbers have grown since.
The spread now spans three African regions. Cases have been reported in Congo in Central Africa, Kenya in Eastern Africa and Nigeria in West Africa, extending the outbreak’s geographic reach.
Kenya offers the clearest sign that containment is still possible. Its nine cases sit in a single cluster, and all trace back to a traveller from Congo who died at a Nairobi hospital on 5 October. Kenya’s Director-General for Health, Patrick Amoth, said in a statement carried by Al Jazeera that there was “no evidence of transmission outside this group”. Of 135 contacts, 134 have been traced and quarantined.
Nigeria’s case raises questions about the speed of detection and the risk of further transmission. According to the health ministry, the patient is a woman in Abuja whose symptoms began on 7 October. She sought care at a private hospital on 11 October and tested positive on 20 October.
Reuters reports that a Nigeria Centre for Disease Control official, Odianosen Ehiakhamen, told Arise TV she was first treated for malaria-like symptoms. Officials have traced 44 contacts, most of them health workers.
Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate says Nigeria contained Ebola in 2014. It recorded 20 cases then and was declared free of the virus after three months. For Africa CDC, whose West Africa regional centre is hosted by Nigeria, this one is close to home.
Then comes the blame question. Uganda’s health ministry says the woman travelled to eastern Congo for business and passed through Uganda in early October without symptoms. “Travel through Uganda does not establish that infection occurred here,” it said, adding that it has no active cases. A senior Nigerian official had earlier described her as originally from Uganda.
The dispute presents a delicate challenge for the regional response. Kaseya has previously warned that penalising countries for reporting cases promptly could discourage transparency and delay the sharing of critical information.
Beneath the diplomacy sits the money. In September, Africa CDC said $2.9 billion had been mobilised for the response, against a $1.4 billion appeal it made in July. On 14 October, Kaseya told a press conference in Kinshasa that donors say they paid out $962 million to implementing partners.
A joint check with Congolese authorities traced only slightly more than $200 million to the groups running the response, he said. The difference—more than $700 million—raises questions about how the funds were channelled and accounted for. The ministers will face pressure to establish how much of the money mobilised for the response has reached the organisations delivering it.
There is also a medical challenge. No licensed vaccine or specific treatment is available for the Bundibugyo strain, leaving surveillance, contact tracing, isolation and supportive care central to the response. In July, Kaseya said more than 70% of new cases were emerging from communities, which he linked to weak contact tracing.
The emergency Ebola meeting is a week away. The virus did not wait for it. Ebola has already reached a third region of Africa.
