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As Ebola cases mount, world health officials convene emergency meeting

The latest Ebola outbreak has reached an urban center, raising international concern and sparking an emergency meeting of the World Health Organization.

Although the Democratic Republic of the Congo has reported 44 likely and confirmed Ebola cases in recent weeks, the viral hemorrhagic fever appeared limited to a rural northwestern part of the country until now.

The newly reported infection in Mbandaka, a city of nearly 1.2 million that is north of previous cases and close to the country's border with the Republic of the Congo, is a "concerning development," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement laying out plans to send 30 experts to the area.

The agency will hold an emergency meeting in Geneva on May 18, in part to discuss whether the latest outbreak is a "public health emergency of international concern," a formal classification to compel global support. The classification has been declared four times historically: the widespread 2009 swine flu pandemic; the 2014 polio resurgence in Africa and central Asia; the 2014 Ebola outbreak in western Africa; and the 2016 spread of the Zika virus in the Americas.

SNL Image

Health workers organize supplies in Monrovia, Liberia, during the world's deadliest Ebola outbreak in 2014.
Credit: AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh

Merck & Co. Inc.'s experimental Ebola vaccine V920 is stockpiled and ready for use, spokesperson Pamela Eisele told S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The drugmaker has supplied 4,300 doses of the investigational vaccine to WHO in Geneva, though it cannot confirm whether the agency has deployed them to the DRC.

In the meantime, Merck is maintaining a stockpile of more than 300,000 emergency-use dose equivalents, Eisele said.

Johnson & Johnson, another American healthcare company developing an Ebola vaccine, has also said it is ready to mobilize.

"If deemed necessary and appropriate by WHO, supplies of our Ebola diagnostic test and vaccine regimen can be made available immediately to public health authorities on the frontlines," Paul Stoffels, J&J's chief scientific officer, said.

The worst Ebola outbreak on record hit western Africa in 2014, eventually spreading through Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia with more than 28,000 reported cases and more than 11,300 deaths over a 2.5-year period, including confirmed cases in Europe and the U.S.

"Had a vaccine been available earlier alongside other critical public health interventions in the devastating epidemic of 2014 to 2016, thousands of lives might have been saved," Jeremy Farrar, director of the British nonprofit research group Wellcome Trust, said in a statement. "But this will be an incredibly challenging operation, across a vast area and fragile health systems — and cannot be limited to deployment of vaccines."

The trust has made an initial fund of up to £2 million available to support the rapid response underway, Farrar said.

WHO said it is working with DRC's Ministry of Health, as well as the international medical network Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, and the public-private vaccine buying organization Gavi - the Vaccine Alliance.

The highly infectious virus, named after the Ebola River in the DRC where one of its first-known outbreaks occurred in 1976, also appeared in the country in 2017 with four deaths and four who survived infections. At the time, U.S. and global health officials said it was important to keep developing both vaccines and treatments to fight the virus. Altogether, global drugmakers were developing four vaccines and four therapies in 2017.

In the current DRC outbreak, there are 44 reported cases of Ebola: 21 suspected cases, 20 probable cases and 3 confirmed cases. Twenty-three of those people have died.