Kinshasa, May 30 (IANS) World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Saturday called on countries that have imposed travel bans or closed borders in response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda to reconsider such measures.Speaking at a joint press conference in Bunia, the capital of the northeastern Ituri Province and the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak, Tedros said such restrictions could complicate response efforts an…
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Washington, May 28 (IANS) The United States has mobilised more than $112 million in bilateral foreign assistance in less than two weeks to combat the fast-spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, the State Department said on Thursday.The announcement came as US health officials warned that the outbreak remained “rapidly evolving and fluid”, while insisting that the current risk to the United States remained low.The State Department said it had finali…
Kinshasa, May 27 (IANS) The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is still at the beginning of its latest Ebola outbreak and may need up to six months to contain it, health minister Roger Kamba has said. The number of people showing symptoms compatible with Ebola had risen to around 1,000, while 101 cases had been laboratory-confirmed, Kamba told a press briefing.He put probable deaths at about 220 till late Tuesday evening, with around 17 deaths confirmed by testing, and said about 3,600 conta…
Kinshasa, May 24 (IANS) The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has temporarily suspended all passenger flights to and from Bunia, the capital of the northeastern Ituri Province that is the epicentre of the ongoing Ebola outbreak, the Ministry of Transport have said. An Ebola outbreak was declared in Ituri on May 15, with Bunia among the main affected areas. According to an official statement on Saturday (local time), no aircraft will be allowed to land at or take off from B…
Addis Ababa, May 22 (IANS) The public health risk from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been upgraded from high to very high, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. “We are revising our risk assessment of Ebola to very high at the national level, high at the regional level, and low at global level,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference.Meanwhile, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) called for enhanced s…
Seoul, May 22 (IANS) The foreign ministry said on Friday it will widen a travel ban in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to three provinces in the country amid the spread of Ebola virus disease.Effective 2 pm Friday, South Korea will issue a Level 4 travel alert, the highest level in its four-tier travel alert system, for Ituri Province in the African country due to the continued rise in deaths linked to the virus, according to the ministry, reports Yonhap news agency.With the latest measure,…
Kinshasa, May 7 (IANS) The President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Felix Tshisekedi, has said that the country may not hold its presidential elections set for 2028 if the war in the east continues, placing national security at the centre of his government’s political agenda.Congo is facing an “aggression war” aimed at destabilising state institutions, looting natural resources and weakening national sovereignty, Tshisekedi told a press conference in Kinshasa, the country’s capit…
Kinshasa, April 18 (IANS) The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the March 23 Movement (M23) rebel group said Friday that progress had been made in Swiss-hosted peace talks on humanitarian access and ceasefire monitoring. In a statement issued after meetings held from April 13 to 17 in Montreux, Switzerland, the two sides said they had made “substantial progress” toward concluding a protocol on humanitarian access and judicial protection, stressing the need to ensure vi…
United Nations, Jan 7 (IANS) The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is sounding the alarm over a surge in violence in Ituri province, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is severely disrupting life-saving operations in the region, a UN spokesperson said.The town of Bule and nearby areas have experienced ongoing hostilities since early December, and local authorities reported that at least 25 civilians have been killed and more than 40 injured o…