GENEVA: Efforts to halt an Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo have made “significant progress”, with the virus now contained to a far smaller and mainly rural area, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday.

“We have put the virus in the corner,” Michael Ryan, the executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, told reporters in Geneva. “I believe we have really squeezed the virus into a much smaller geographical area,” he said.

Ebola is now essentially only transmitting within an area of eastern DRC between Mambasa, Komanda, Mandima and Beni, he said.

At the height of the latest outbreak, 207 “health zones” were affected by Ebola, a figure that now stands at only 27, Ryan said.

But he stressed that despite a “much lower level of transmission”, the danger was not over. “Containing a virus is a different prospect than to eliminate that virus from human populations,” Ryan said. “We have significantly contained the virus in a much smaller geographical area,” he said. “Now we have to kill the virus.”

Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2019