Ebola testing has improved in DRC but still isn't nearly enough
Sophia Mulei, a laboratory technologist, works with a control sample inside the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Laboratory at Uganda Virus Research Institute in Entebbe, Uganda. The lab is one of the primary centers for the testing of Ebola samples. Hajarah Nalwadda/Getty Images hide cap
Sophia Mulei, a laboratory technologist, works with a control sample inside the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Laboratory at Uganda Virus Research Institute in Entebbe, Uganda. The lab is one of the primary centers for the testing of Ebola samples. Hajarah Nalwadda/Getty Images hide caption
Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo began worrying about possible Ebola cases in mid-April. Deaths in the northeastern part of the country that seemed like they may have been caused by the deadly virus prompted officials to take samples. They then sent them to the lab in Bunia.
"The first samples were tested on April 30th," says Jean-Jaques Muyembe , general director of INRB, DRC's national biomedical research center. The lab ran the samples on GeneXpert, a machine that automates the process of detecting specific bits of viral DNA. The results came back negative for Ebola. So did more samples a couple of weeks later.
Eventually, officials sent samples hundreds of miles away to Kinshasa for more specialized testing.
The problem was that GeneXpert, the machine that forms the backbone of DRC's Ebola surveillance, couldn't detect the rare species that was circulating, says Muyembe. So it was mid-May before officials rang the alarm bell and declared an outbreak of Ebola Bundibugyo.
That month-long delay allowed the outbreak to grow into one of the largest Ebola outbreaks ever. Suspected cases ballooned to over 1,100 as labs struggled to keep up with incoming samples.
"The initial response has been pretty significantly hampered by the lack of appropriate diagnostics on the ground," says Caia Dominicus, senior technical adviser for the independent non-profit International Pandemic Preparedness Secretariat . If officials can't test in a timely manner, they can't get patients to isolate and prevent the virus from spreading, she says.
"Diagnostic capacity has improved significantly from where we were three and a half weeks ago," says Abdirahman Mahamud, who directs health emergency alert and response operations at the World Health Organization. The backlog of cases has mostly disappeared, but he warns current testing capacity is not enough to keep up with an outbreak that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects could reach 20,000 cases by August.
