A total of 2,758 people, most of them children, have died since January due to a measles outbreak affecting 23 of the 26 provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) revealed yesterday, which highlighted the need to raise more funds.
“The measles epidemic, declared in June this year, is the worst the country has faced in the last decade, with more than 145 thousand contagions”, the coordinator of the MSF emergency team in the DRC told EFE over the phone, Fabrizio Andriolo.
“The 2.5 million dollars raised out of the 8.9 million needed for the health response plan are not enough. The contrast with the Ebola epidemic in the east of the country, which attracts multiple organizations and hundreds of millions of dollars, is alarming”, expressed Andriolo.
The current Ebola epidemic that has been affecting the northeast of the country for a year, concentrated in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, has resulted in 1,934 deaths out of a total of 2,877 registered cases, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO) from 17 of August.
“Two months after the official declaration and just a few weeks before the start of the academic year, the measles epidemic shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, since July it has worsened with an increase in new cases in several provinces”, said MSF head of mission in the DRC, Karel Janssens, in a statement.
Thanks to a mobile team, doctors on the MSF field are able to reach the most remote areas, as well as maintain adequate temperature conditions for vaccination, which has already targeted almost 475,000 children between 6 months and 5 years old.