Data: DRC Ministry of Health; Chart: Andrew Witherspoon and Harry Stevens/Axios
The world's 2nd-largest Ebola outbreak on record in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is showing no signs of slowing after at least 5 months, with the number of cases soaring past 600 and the death toll eclipsing 400 on Jan. 14.
Why it matters: The outbreak of the deadly virus, which causes fever, headaches, diarrhea and bleeding, has been exacerbated by insecurity in eastern Congo. The World Health Organization and nongovernmental organizations responding to the outbreak have never had to combat Ebola in such a threatening environment before, and some treatment centers have been destroyed.
Details: On Jan. 14, the Ministry of Health in the Congo reported that there have been a total of 658 cases, along with 402 fatalities (confirmed Ebola deaths plus suspected deaths from the disease) since the outbreak began in August in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri.
This makes this outbreak the 2nd-largest Ebola outbreak on record, well below the West Africa outbreak in 2014–16, which killed more than 10,000.
Ominously, the number of cases under investigation as of Jan. 14 were 200.
Unlike the largest Ebola outbreak on record, combatting the ongoing outbreak is largely being left to the World Health Organization.
The U.S. has been reluctant to send specialists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the front lines due to the security situation, particularly in Beni, the epicenter of the outbreak.
What they're saying: Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Axios that the spike in cases under investigation likely has to do with Ebola workers resuming their work following election-related violence over the past few weeks.
"My hunch is because there was a gap in response due to the election-related interruptions," Nuzzo told Axios on Tuesday.
Nuzzo says she worries about the lack of a broader, international response to contain the outbreak, since the longer it festers, the more likely it is to spread to different parts of the Congo, and to neighboring countries.
“What’s been missing from this outbreak is the international response.”
— Jennifer Nuzzo, Johns Hopkins University
The WHO acknowledges the challenging circumstances facing its nearly 500 personnel in the Congo. "The Ebola outbreak in DRC is occurring in one of the most complex settings possible," WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević told Axios via email. "The main challenges are the security environment, pockets of mistrust among affected populations, and poor infection prevention and control in many public and private health facilities.
Why you will hear about this again: The Ebola outbreak in the Congo follows another Ebola outbreak in a different part of the country, and it comes soon after the Zika outbreak raised alarm from South America into parts of the U.S.
With a burgeoning population, increases in migration and the lack of a robust international rapid-response force to respond to emerging epidemics, more outbreaks like this one are inevitable, Nuzzo and other health experts warn.
Antarctica is losing ice 6 times faster than in 1980s
The western edge of iceberg A68, as seen in 2017. Photo: NASA/Nathan Kurtz
Antarctica is shedding ice at an increasingly rapid rate, potentially imperiling coastlines around the world as sea levels increase in response, a new study finds.
Why it matters: Antarctica is already contributing a growing amount to sea level rise, the study found, and things could get much worse.
The big picture: The new study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Antarctica has shed ice at a growing rate in recent decades.
From 1979 to 1990, the average annual ice mass loss rate was 40 billion metric tons per year.
This jumped to 252 billion metric tons per year, between 2009 to 2017.
The study, from glaciologists at the University of California at Irvine and Netherlands' Utrecht University, also contains the worrisome conclusion that East Antarctica has been losing mass since the 1980s. That's important because previous studies had regarded that part of the continent as stable or not yet undergoing a net loss.
Details: Warming ocean waters are weakening floating ice shelves, which act like doorstops that keep massive amounts of inland ice from flowing quickly into the sea.
The warm waters, pumped in by natural variability and human-caused climate change, are melting such shelves from below, and the new study found the parts of Antarctica that are melting the fastest are ones that have an ocean influence.
The researchers set out to complete a comprehensive survey of the ice-bound continent using a variety of data sources, such as NASA aircraft reconnaissance and satellite measurements. They examined 18 regions that included 176 glacier basins.
The study took into account the balance between inland snowfall and coastal ice melt. As recently as 2001, scientists thought that increased snowfall could compensate for ice loss at the margins, but that is no longer the case.
What they're saying: "The really big questions are whether the recent acceleration in mass loss will continue, leading to rapid deglaciation of one or more basins and much faster sea-level rise," Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Penn State University, told Axios via email. Alley was not involved in the new study.
"We do not know the answer to this, but we do know that the more humans warm the climate, the more likely it is that the ice will respond."
Robin Bell, who studies ice sheets at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, says the new study is a welcome addition to the literature on Antarctica. "[It] Shows how the ice sheets are in a different place and changing faster than we could have imagined in the 1970's," she said in an email to Axios.
What's next: Glaciologists need to reconcile the new study's findings with a large study published last year that found East Antarctica has not been losing ice so quickly, though it raised the possibility of future losses.
