The World Health Organization announced that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo can be controlled, easing fears of an international public health emergency.
Three new cases of Ebola were later confirmed in Mbandaka on Friday, in a part of the city next to the Congo River.
The ministry said in a statement late on Friday that the new cases had been reported on Thursday in the neighborhood of Wangata, next to the river, and samples tested positive for Ebola. Another suspected case surfaced on Friday.
The WHO’s Emergency Committee of 11 experts said the rapid response had mitigated the risk from the outbreak, which was declared 10 days ago and has killed 25 people since early April.
“Interventions underway provide strong reason to believe that the outbreak can be brought under control,” the committee said in a statement.
They decided not to declare a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC), a formal alert that puts governments on notice and helps mobilize resources and research.
However, committee chairman Robert Steffen said the “vigorous” response to the outbreak must continue.
“Without that, the situation is likely to deteriorate significantly,” he told a news conference in Geneva.
Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity and an infectious diseases expert, said the decision not to declare an emergency was “the right one for the time being,” but should be kept under review.
“We can’t predict how the outbreak will progress, and the WHO must keep the situation under frequent review and not hesitate to declare a PHEIC if the situation shows signs of deteriorating,” he said in a statement.
The outbreak, Congo’s ninth since the disease made its first known appearance near the northern Ebola river in the 1970s, has raised concerns that the virus could spread downstream to the capital Kinshasa, which has a population of 10 million.
The WHO was heavily criticized for being too slow to declare an international emergency during an outbreak in West Africa in 2013 to 2016. That epidemic spread mainly through Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. It killed more than 11,300 people and infected 28,600.
One of the problems then was locating people who had been in contact with Ebola patients to stop them spreading the deadly virus.
The outbreak is a test of a new experimental Ebola vaccine that proved effective in the West Africa outbreak a few years ago. Vaccinations are expected to start early in the week, with more than 4,000 doses already in Congo and more on the way.
A major challenge will be keeping the vaccines cold in the vast, impoverished country where infrastructure is poor.
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the vaccine would encourage people to come forward, making him confident that very few of around 532 contacts identified so far would go missing.
WHO’s head of emergency preparedness and response Peter Salama said the contact tracing rate was “extremely high” in the city of Mbandaka and “very high” in Bikoro, the small town where most of the 45 confirmed, probable or suspected Ebola cases have occurred since April 4.
More challenging were the small peripheral villages, reachable only by motorcycle, where the first cases went initially unrecorded last month.
Tedros said emergency response teams planned to start vaccinating frontline health workers in Congo by Sunday, but Salama said the date had not been fixed.
“As early as Monday we’ll start,” he said.
The plan involves vaccinating “rings” of contacts around each Ebola patient, and then a second ring around each contact.
The WHO is sending 7,540 doses of the vaccine developed by Merck, enough to vaccinate 50 rings of 150 people. Salama said 8,000 to 10,000 people would be vaccinated in the first phase.
The outbreak was declared more than a week ago in Congo's remote northwest. Its spread has some Congolese worried.
"Even if it's not happening here yet I have to reduce contact with people. May God protect us in any case," Grace Ekofo, a 23-year-old student in Kinshasa, told The Associated Press.
A teacher in Mbandaka, 53-year-old Jean Mopono, said they were trying to implement preventative measures by teaching students not to greet each other by shaking hands or kissing.
"We pray that this epidemic does not take place here," Mopono said.
