The outbreak, the second worst in history, is believed to have
killed 587 people in a region beset by violence and poverty. A rapid
international response has so far stopped the disease spreading into
neighboring countries.
"We have averted a much larger outbreak," WHO chief Tedros
Ghebreyesus Adhanom told a news conference, adding that the affected
area was contained and shrinking.
"Our target now is to finish it within the next six months."
The number of new cases has halved to 25 per week since January, and
the virus was now concentrated in Butembo and Katwa. However,
community distrust and attacks by armed groups were hampering the
response.
On Thursday, a group of young men attacked an Ebola center for the
fifth time since last month, Congo's health ministry said, after
medics attempted to collect samples from the body of a man suspected
of having died of the virus.
Police opened fire to disperse the crowd in the Biena health zone,
west of Butembo, killing one person and injuring another, the
ministry said in a statement.
Last week the head of medical charity MSF, which had two facilities
attacked, said the battle against Ebola was being lost because
ordinary people did not trust health workers and the response was
overly militarized.
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Tedros, who has just returned from the outbreak zone, said local
people were despairing and rightly wondered why the world was so
exercised by Ebola while caring so little about other problems,
including cholera and malaria.
"I’d actually like to call upon the international community to link
the outbreak control now with developing the health system," he
said.
"That's a big challenge. Otherwise we will appear as if we are
preventing Ebola getting into other countries and we don’t care
about the demands of the community."
He said the WHO would not leave when the outbreak ended, but would
help the government to build stronger health services.
He called on international donors to fund the $148 million plan to
tackle Ebola in the next six months, a tiny spend compared to the
potential cost. The worst outbreak, which killed 11,300 people in
West Africa in 2013-2016, cost an estimated $53 billion, according
to one study.
(Reporting by Tom Miles; Additional reporting by Fiston Mahamba in
Goma, Giulia Paravicini in Brussels and Aaron Ross in Dakar; Editing
by Alison Williams and Frances Kerry)
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