Declan Walsh

I mean, in previous outbreaks in West Africa in 2014, 2015, in the second largest outbreak, which was also in Congo, health workers ran into similar problems.

And so there are tools, there are techniques, there are ideas for combating this problem, but it really does take a concerted, intensive effort to

While we were in Mongbalu, I went to see the local parish priest, Catholic priest, because this preacher who had just died was a Catholic.

And I said, what are you doing to try and address this problem?

And he said at mass last Sunday in my sermon, I appealed to people to carry out safe burials, to adhere to the correct practices.

But he said until now, people are not listening.

He said it's going to take a much bigger and more intensive effort to try and convince these communities about what they need to change in their own lives in order to keep themselves safe.

There has been one death in neighboring Uganda, and I believe about eight or nine suspected cases at the moment.

There are great fears that it is also spreading into South Sudan.

But for now, this virus has, for the large part, remained confined in Aituri province, and there have been some cases in two other Congolese provinces as well.

But again, I got to stress that we just don't know enough about the extent of this virus just yet.

And that brings us to another key part of the effort to fight the virus that they haven't frankly even started on in earnest yet, which is called contact tracing.

That's right.

The problem is that because this is such a rare strain and because there are such limited testing facilities, they've barely started the work of tracing those contacts yet.

And all the experts in this field say that until you trace the contacts, you cannot cut the chain of transmission and you can't really expect to contain the spread of the disease.

Well, the worst case scenario is that this outbreak goes on for several years and that the numbers soar, not just the numbers of people affected, but that the death toll rises possibly to the level that we saw back in West Africa in 2014, 2015.

But, you know, it doesn't have to be that way.

There is an outcome here where the scale of international assistance rises to meet the challenge of this outbreak.

So I think it's still an open question about which way we're going to go, because don't forget, we are very early into this outbreak.

That's kind of, in a way, what's so worrisome about it.