Ebola death toll rises as two Americans are flown to Europe for treatment

The suspected death toll from the Ebola outbreak in central Africa rose again Wednesday as a group of potentially exposed Americans was arriving in Europe for monitoring and the World Health Organization warned a vaccine was still months away.

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There are now more than 600 suspected cases and 139 suspected deaths from the virus, mostly in Congo, the head of the World Health Organization said at a news conference.

“We expect those numbers to keep increasing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “We know that the scale of the epidemic in DRC is much larger,” he said, using the initialism for Democratic Republic of Congo.

With two cases and one suspected death in neighboring Uganda, the WHO warned that although the risk of a global pandemic was very low, the threat for countries in the region was severe.

Battling the epidemic will be difficult because it is being caused by a rare strain of Ebola called Bundibugyo, which has no approved vaccine or treatment and a case fatality rate of 30% to 50%. The outbreak was also caught late, believed to have started “a couple of months ago,” Anaïs Legand, the WHO’s technical officer for viral and hemorrhagic fevers, said Wednesday.

Furthermore, it is centered in an area riven by recent conflict, with cases already detected in Congo’s rebel-held city of Goma, 230 miles from the epicenter.

Officials are still scarred by the memory of an outbreak that tore through West Africa from 2013 to 2016, killing more than 11,000 people.

Although the most common form of Ebola, the Zaire strain, does have an approved vaccine, Bundibugyo has no such countermeasure. Asked about the timeline for developing one, a WHO expert indicated Wednesday it was months away at best.

Dr. Vasee Moorthy, the WHO’s senior science and strategy adviser, said at the news conference that one vaccine candidate was six to nine months away from being available for clinical trials.

Another, being developed by the University of Oxford and India’s Serum Institute, was having doses “manufactured as we speak,” he said.

But there was no data from animal testing to support the shots, so while “it is possible that doses could be available for clinical trial” in two to three months, he added, “there is a lot of uncertainty about whether that is a promising candidate.”

Meanwhile, an American missionary who contracted the virus treating patients in Congo has been admitted to a specialist hospital in Germany, that country’s health ministry told NBC News on Wednesday.

Dr. Peter Stafford, 39, is at Berlin’s Charité hospital, where he is being treated in an isolation ward in the department of infectious diseases and intensive care medicine, the ministry said. He had unknowingly operated on a patient with Ebola before the outbreak was detected, according to leaders of Serge, the Christian missionary group he works for.

Also flown to Germany were his wife, Rebekah Stafford, 38, who is also a doctor and treated the same patient, and their four young children, Serge said Wednesday.

Another physician, Patrick LaRochelle, 46, is thought to have been exposed through a second patient and is being flown from Congo to Bulovka Hospital, in the Czech capital, Prague, according to Serge.

Neither LaRochelle nor any other members of Stafford’s family are showing symptoms, the group said.

Like its counterpart in Germany, the Czech Health Ministry said it was receiving the American patient at the request of the U.S. government.

Asked whether if he was worried about the Ebola outbreak, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday, “Of course we are.”

He pointed out that the U.S. had already mobilized about $14 million in assistance and indicated the aid would be used to open up 50 clinics. He did not provide further details.

“It’s a little tough to get to it, because it’s in a rural area” and “a war-torn country, unfortunately,” Rubio said. “We’ll have more to announce on that. We’re going to lean into it pretty heavy.”

Former officials and independent experts have criticized the Trump administration for its decision to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, previously a cornerstone of the global Ebola response.

The State Department has denied as “false” the allegations that the cuts have hampered the Ebola response.