Ebola Cases Pass 10,000 in Six Months as U.S. Pledges Over $800 Million

The current Ebola outbreak has infected more than 10,000 people, killing about half of them, in under six months. The virus has spread faster and reached more cases than any outbreak except the 2014 West Africa event, which eventually sickened almost 30,000 people.

Most cases are in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Recent cases in Kenya and Nigeria show how difficult it is to contain. The virus began circulating around February, officials believe, but was not identified because the strain involved is rare and was missed by initial tests. The outbreak was declared in mid-May.

U.S. foreign aid cuts may have also delayed detection by interrupting routine surveillance activities. The response was behind from the start, according to Jonathan Lambert, NPR's global health correspondent. The region is remote, roads can wash out, and conflict continues in the area.

Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease physician at Boston University who has worked on past Ebola responses, said the situation was predictable. "The writing was on the wall that this would be a hard road and it would need international cooperation, it would need rapid response," Bhadelia said.

The 2014 West Africa outbreak drew a major U.S. role, including a White House Ebola czar and more than 3,000 U.S. personnel sent to the region. This time, the international response has been quieter. The U.S. has pledged more than $800 million, while pledges at this stage of the 2014 outbreak reached the billions.

Katie Thomas-Canfield, interim Ebola response director for the International Rescue Committee, described the financing as limited compared with prior work. "I think the degree of international solidarity has been a lot less. The scale of financing that's available for this response is really a fraction of what it was in our previous response," she said.

Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo have expanded testing and built more than 2,000 beds in treatment centers across the country. Most deaths still happen outside those centers, in communities where transmission goes undetected. People avoid the centers partly out of mistrust of response teams that arrive in protective gear and take sick family members away.

Cases have declined or held steady in areas where response work has run for months. New areas require teams to begin again, so the case count continues to rise. Vaccines and treatments for this strain are in development but are not yet widely available.

The outbreak has reached more than double the roughly 4,000 cases recorded at the five-and-a-half month mark of the 2014 West Africa outbreak, and it spans a much larger area.