Three Canadian scientists will be based in Luebo in the affected area and approximately 10 kilometres north of Kampungu, where Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) have established their base, Kelly Keith, a spokesperson for the Winnipeg laboratory, confirmed Sunday.
Keith said the Canadian team will be comprised of Dr. Heinz Feldmann, laboratory technician Allen Grolla and Dr. Gary Kobinger. Feldmann is an expert on viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola and the related Marburg virus; Feldmann and Grolla spent weeks in Angola in 2005 helping to contain a large Marburg outbreak there.
The three will bring a small mobile laboratory developed by staff of the National Microbiology Laboratory which can operate with limited resources. They will serve as part of a joint team made up of experts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the Public Health Agency of Canada. (The Winnipeg lab is part of the agency.)
Lab facilities are critical in such circumstances to identify who is actually suffering from Ebola - and therefore must be treated in strict isolation - and who has one of myriad other conditions which share the same vague symptoms as hemorrhagic fevers at the onset of illness.
The fact that the mobile lab can be run in primitive settings should come in handy on this outbreak, which is occurring in a part of the country - formerly known as Zaire - where even short distances are tortuous to travel because of poor roads. According to Medecins Sans Frontieres, it takes up to three days to travel the 250 kilometres between the provincial capital, Kananga, and the outbreak zone.
Because of that, the situation on the ground remains unclear. News reports suggest nearly 400 people have been ill and more than 160 have died in an outbreak that may date back to April.
But a number of those cases are unlikely to have been Ebola, given the reported symptoms and the fact that the Ebola-Zaire species of the virus typically kills between 80 and 90 per cent of people who become infected.
Testing in Atlanta has confirmed that the responsible virus is Ebola-Zaire, Dr. Pierre Rollin, a hemorrhagic fevers expert from the CDC, said in an interview.
In fact, samples sent to Atlanta confirmed some cases of Ebola but also some cases of shigellosis, a bacterial disease that attacks the gastrointestinal tract. The possibility of concurrent cholera or typhoid outbreaks has also been raised.
"Certainly the health conditions are not very good in this area and they can have a lot of things going together," Rollin noted.
Rollin was part of the team that battled the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kitwit, also in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was one of the largest Ebola outbreaks on record, with 315 cases and 250 deaths.
He recalled the difficulties posed by the lack of local resources.
"I remember during Kitwit it was a nightmare. There was no dry ice for example for keeping the specimens cold. . . . And we had to send it from either Atlanta or South Africa," Rollin said.
"So we were sending a huge box of dry ice from Atlanta. It arrived there and with whatever was left we were packing the specimens and sending them back to Atlanta."
