Ebola has been declared an international public health emergency

EBOLA SHOULD never have made it to Goma, the second biggest city in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It did because a pastor, who had been in Butembo apparently trying to cure patients by laying hands on them, then travelled back. At each of the three health checkpoints he passed through, he gave a fake name, keeping his temperature down with heavy doses of paracetamol. On arriving in the city, he checked into a clinic where he tested positive for the disease; he died in an ambulance some hours later while being taken to a treatment centre back in Butembo.

Such are the difficulties health workers face when trying to stop the spread of Ebola, the latest outbreak of which has now killed almost 1,700 people in Congo. It is the second biggest outbreak ever, after the one in west Africa in 2014-2016, and the first to happen in a war zone, where doctors have to worry about guerrillas with machetes, not just the virus. On the evening of July 17th, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), announced he had been advised by the WHO’s emergency committee to declare the disease a “public health emergency of international concern”, only the fifth in history.