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GENEVA / WHO EBOLA UPDATE
STORY: GENEVA / WHO EBOLA UPDATE
TRT: 1:35
SOURCE: UNTV CH
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 18 MAY 2018 GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1. Exterior shot, Palais des Nations
2. Wide shot, United Nations press room
3. Close up, hands typing on laptop
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Tarik Jasarevic, Spokesperson, World Health Organization (WHO):
“The big change is that 11 cases from Bikoro have tested positive, have now been confirmed positive, so these cases now became confirmed from being suspect. So we have 45 cases of Ebola, 14 confirmed, 10 suspects and 21 probable.”
5. Close-up shot, journalist
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Tarik Jasarevic, Spokesperson, World Health Organization (WHO):
“It is important now to just understand that because of this confirmed case in Mbandaka itself, that the work has now to multiply, because we have now three different locations where we work: villages near Bikoro, Bikoro itself and Mbandaka. And that obviously has an impact on the scale of operations so it means that more people may need to be deployed.”
7. Medium shot, journalists
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Tarik Jasarevic, Spokesperson, World Health Organization (WHO):
“By tomorrow we should have around 7,500 doses so we did second shipment to the DR Congo. We have some vaccines that will remain here in Geneva on standby. We hope again to start vaccinating as soon as possible.”
9. Various shots, journalists
Confirmation that Ebola virus has reached a major city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) will mean that a bigger response to the outbreak is now required in view of the higher risk of the disease spreading, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
The development follows an announcement on Thursday by DRC’s Ministry of Health that laboratory tests had confirmed a positive case of the deadly disease in Mbandaka, a city of nearly 1.2 million people in Equateur Province in north-western DRC.
Until this point the disease had been contained to rural Bikoro health zone, some 150 kilometres from Mbandaka.
The outbreak – which has killed 25 people to date - was first declared on 8 May; it is the ninth time that DRC has been faced with the disease since it was first discovered in 1976 in Yambuku.
In Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, more than 11,300 people died in when an Ebola epidemic spread between 2014 and 2016.
Spokesperson for the UN health agency Tarik Jasarevic told journalists in Geneva “the work has now to multiply, because we have now three different locations where we work: villages near Bikoro, Bikoro itself and Mbandaka. And that obviously has an impact on the scale of operations so it means that more people may need to be deployed.”
According to WHO the risk of the disease spreading nationally is “very high” but it remains “low” at an international level.
Jasarevic said that there are now “45 cases of Ebola, 14 confirmed, 10 suspects and 21 probable.”
He added,“The big change is that 11 cases from Bikoro have tested positive, have now been confirmed positive, so these cases now became confirmed from being suspect. So we have 45 cases of Ebola, 14 confirmed, 10 suspects and 21 probable.”
WHO is now rapidly scaling up the search for all contacts of the confirmed case in the Mbandaka area and working with UN agencies UNICEF, IOM, WFP and other partners to promote awareness about how to avoid catching and spreading the disease.
Asked about when stocks of Ebola vaccine might start to be used, Jasarevic said that WHO had 300,000 vaccines “at its disposal” and that it wanted to deploy them as soon as possible.
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