US missionary with Ebola evacuated to Germany for treatment

U.S. health authorities announced Tuesday that a medical missionary who contracted Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is being transported to Germany for treatment.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the patient will be treated at Charite University Hospital in Berlin following a U.S. request for assistance.

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

The missionary, identified by the Serge Christian mission organization as Peter Stafford, is a U.S. citizen. Global health authorities said Tuesday that an outbreak of a rare Ebola strain in the DRC and Uganda has killed more than 130 people, with more than 500 suspected cases.

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

The leader of the WHO’s team in the DRC said she expects the outbreak to continue for at least another two months.

In the United States, Dr. Satish Pillai, the CDC incident manager for the Ebola response, told reporters in a phone call that plans are being finalized to transport six other high-risk contacts to Europe.

“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 will go to the Czech Republic while the rest will go to Germany.

Pillai also stressed that the current risk to the United States from the outbreak remains low, and said the CDC is coordinating with state, local, tribal and territorial health departments.

Jean-Jacques Muyembe, a virologist at the DRC’s National Institute of Biomedical Research, said the country expects shipments of an experimental vaccine targeting different Ebola strains from the United States and the United Kingdom.