Ebola outbreak poses massive challenges, warns senior charity official

The Ebola outbreak is posing massive challenges for medical aid organisations, a senior humanitarian official has said.

Kate White, who is a program manager for the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and is flying out to the Democratic Republic of Congo, says she is "extremely concerned about the inability to get resources" to the country.

Three Red Cross volunteers who died earlier this month were among the first known victims of DR Congo's Ebola outbreak, and likely caught it while managing dead bodies.

The outbreak has resulted in more than 200 suspected deaths and more than 850 suspected cases.

White, who flew from Manchester Airport on Sunday as part of an international relief effort, said: "It really reinforces the need to make sure that we have all of the protective measures in place."

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently said the disease may be spreading faster than originally thought and have declared a public health emergency of international concern.

There is no approved vaccine for this outbreak, however experimental ones are in development.

There are also no drugs that target it, making the illness harder to treat.

White, from York, who has worked on previous Ebola epidemics in Africa, said: "In terms of how many years we have been seeing these outbreaks for and we still don't have comprehensive medical countermeasures... [treatment, vaccines, diagnostic testing that can be rolled out rapidly] says something about the state of the world right now."

She added she was also concerned about the impact of closing airspace on transporting healthcare workers and resources to affected areas.

"The pure volume of what we need to get in right now is massive."

Improvements in the ability to confirm cases were required "across all of the geographic areas where it's impacting because we don't want people stuck in treatment centres if they don't have it", she said.

"We want to be able to discharge them as soon as they recover from it so they can go back to their families and we're not there yet."

Ebola is a rare but deadly disease caused by a virus.

Ebola viruses normally infect animals, but outbreaks among humans can sometimes start when people eat or handle infected animals.