US Missionary With Ebola to Be Treated in Germany

A US medical missionary who contracted Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is being flown to Germany for treatment, as health officials warn that the outbreak in Central Africa is spreading fast.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday that the patient will be treated at Charite University Hospital in Berlin after Washington requested assistance.

“Arrangements are currently being made to admit and treat the patient in Germany,” a CDC spokesperson said.

The patient has been identified by the Serge Christian mission organisation as Peter Stafford, a US citizen.

His evacuation comes as global health authorities confront a growing outbreak of a rare Ebola strain in the DRC and Uganda. More than 130 people have died, and more than 500 suspected cases have been reported.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic”.

The WHO’s team leader in the DRC said the outbreak is expected to continue for at least another two months, an estimate that underlines the difficulty of containing Ebola in a region already facing insecurity and weak healthcare infrastructure.

In the US, Dr Satish Pillai, the CDC’s incident manager for the Ebola response, said officials are finalising plans to move six other people considered high-risk contacts to Europe for quarantine and monitoring.

“The individuals are travelling to Europe, including in Germany, and they will be in quarantine during their monitoring period,” Pillai said, adding that one person would be going to the Czech Republic while the rest will go to Germany.

Pillai also stressed that the risk to the United States remains low. The CDC is coordinating with state, local, tribal and territorial health departments as part of the response.

The outbreak has put renewed pressure on global health systems to move quickly. Ebola is highly dangerous, but it does not spread casually; transmission requires direct contact with bodily fluids from someone who is infected or contaminated materials.

Still, once cases appear across borders, containment becomes a race against movement, delayed diagnosis and limited treatment capacity.

Jean-Jaques Muyembe, a virus expert at the DRC’s National Institute of Biomedical Research, said the country expects shipments of an experimental vaccine for different types of Ebola from the United States and the United Kingdom.