May 11, 2018•Update: May 11, 2018
By Fatih Erel
GENEVA
The World Health Organization (WHO) has a total of 300,000 doses of Ebola disease vaccines in stock which can be deployed to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following the green light from the DRC government to begin vaccination process, the WHO deputy director-general said on Friday.
There have been two confirmed cases of the Ebola virus disease in the DRC, WHO Deputy Director-General of Emergency Preparedness and Response Emergency Preparedness and Response Peter Salama told Anadolu Agency in Geneva on Friday.
"It is an experimental vaccine that has to be kept between negative 60 and negative 80 [degrees] Celsius. But, you can imagine in rural DRC where there is not even electricity, it is not easy thing to do," he said.
Salama also expressed concern over the risk of regional spread of the disease, in nine neighboring countries.
This is the DRC’s ninth Ebola outbreak since the discovery of the virus in the country in 1976.
Ebola caused global alarm in 2014 when the world's worst outbreak began in West Africa, killing more than 11,300 people and infecting an estimated 28,600 as it swept through Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
