Are we heading for another Ebola crisis? – podcast

Kay Lay and Prosper Heri Ngorora report on the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

“This outbreak I first heard about on Friday when an email popped into my inbox from the Africa CDC,” Kay Lay, the Guardian’s global health correspondent, tells Annie Kelly. “It said: ‘There’s an outbreak of Ebola in the DRC. There’s 246 suspected cases.

There’s 65 deaths.’”

Kay thought it must be an ongoing outbreak of Ebola she had somehow missed. “Those numbers, they’re not what you expect to see when you’re first hearing about an outbreak.

They’re the kind of level of cases, deaths, that you might see a good few weeks, maybe months, into an outbreak.

A few days later, we were already at 500 cases and 130 suspected deaths.

So that’s a doubling in a matter of days.”