Kat Ley

Those images of people in almost, they look like space suits, covering your whole body to protect the health workers from the virus.

It took two years to get on top of that outbreak.

And that came at a time when we didn't have drugs or vaccines against Ebola.

And that was contained through this painstaking process of identifying cases, isolating them, finding out who they'd been in contact with, then isolate those people at risk and really try and break those chains of transmission.

So this outbreak I first heard about on Friday when an email popped into my inbox from the Africa CDC and it said there's an outbreak of Ebola in the DRC, there's 246 suspected cases, there's 65 deaths.

And I was looking at it thinking this must be an ongoing outbreak of Ebola that I've somehow missed because those numbers, they're not what you expect to see regularly.

When you're first hearing about an outbreak, they're the kind of level of cases, deaths that you might see a good few weeks, maybe months into an outbreak.

A few days later, we were already at 500 cases and 130 suspected deaths.

So that's a doubling in a matter of days.

Absolutely.

And then on Sunday, the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern.

So almost all the cases are in the Ituri region of the DRC, which borders South Sudan, it borders Uganda.

The kind of first case

death was on April the 27th.

And there were some local tests done around that time.

The tests that were being used, they only pick up the Zaire strain.

So the local officials doing those tests thought, this isn't Ebola.

They did send samples to the National Lab, which is why a few days later we found out actually, no, it is this other strain, the Bundibugio strain.

Yeah, so this is a really interesting element of potentially why it took a bit longer than ideal to raise the alarm.

It's a very remote area.