Kat Ley

So I've been talking to people and they say, you know, it takes us five days to get from Kinshasa to this area.

It's a conflict affected area.

So there are rival militias kind of vying for control in the area.

The conflict in the area has displaced people.

thousands of people you know over the last year it's also an area where there's a lot of mining activity so you get a lot of people moving around they come there for work and then maybe they go home so it's

A place where maybe it's quite good conditions for a virus to spread because people might get infected and then they're moving around.

Yeah, we've seen actually increasingly over recent years, healthcare facilities becoming targets in conflicts of all kinds.

And that can really put people off going to a clinic or a hospital.

I was speaking to one doctor and he was saying, even if we did have a vaccine for this strain,

You can't be sending vaccinators in where healthcare professionals are being killed.

It makes it much harder to deliver that kind of health work.

Certainly Africa CDC say that they are going to need millions more in funding to get on top of this.

So there are vaccines at various stages of development.

None have entered human trials yet.

It will be certainly weeks, probably months before those protocols can kind of be developed and experimental treatments even can be deployed on the ground.

The DRC has experience dealing with Ebola outbreaks.

This is its 17th.

And we can do it without vaccines, without therapeutics, through this kind of painstaking process of tracking down cases and who they've been in contact with.

It's just a lot harder and it takes a lot longer.

So there was a fairly damning report out on Monday from the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board.