The Democratic Republic of Congo's health minister Oly Ilunga resigned in protest on Monday after the president said last week it was stripping his team of control over coordinating the response to what has become the second-deadliest Ebola outbreak in history, according to Reuters.
Even though Ilunga has overseen the response to the 11-month outbreak across the country, President Felix Tshisekedi’s office said on Saturday it was reassigning responsibility for the response to a multi-disciplinary team that would report directly to the president.
Ilunga's resignation letter spoke against the “interference in the management of the response” while criticizing the external pressure to use a second Ebola vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson after he already expressed objections to the technique.
“It would be fanciful to think that the new vaccine proposed by actors who have shown an obvious lack of ethics by voluntarily hiding important information from medical authorities, could have a significant impact on the control of the current outbreak,” he said.
It's unclear which actors Ilunga was referring to, but international donors such as the World Health Organization and Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) have been advocating to use the second vaccine.
Ilunga said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has not been proved to be effective and that deploying a second vaccine would confuse people at a time when many are still wary of health workers during the epidemic.
The vaccine currently being used by DRC officials is manufactured by Merck and has been administered to more than 170,000 people.
The outbreak reached the major city of Goma, which is home to 2 million people, for the first time last week, posing a threat to Central Africa since the urban area is a major transport hub for the region.
The DRC health ministry said a man who had arrived in the regional center on Sunday had been quickly transported to an Ebola treatment center, while local authorities tracked down all the passengers on the bus the man took from Butembo.
“Because of the speed with which the patient was identified and isolated, and the identification of all the other bus passengers coming from Butembo, the risk of it spreading in the rest of the city of Goma is small,” the health ministry said.
The Ebola outbreak has already killed more than 1,600 people in the last year, while 700 people have recovered from the illness.
The DRC's health ministry said there have been a total of 2,489 cases, of which 2,395 are confirmed.
The health ministries in neighboring countries said they have been preparing for months for the possibility of Ebola crossing their borders and health workers on the frontlines have already been vaccinated.
-WN.com, Maureen Foody
Photo:
AP / Al-hadji Kudra Maliro
