ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Health officials are still scrambling to understand the scope of the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. The Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda have nearly 400 confirmed cases now, just three weeks after the outbreak began, meaning it's spreading faster than all past Ebola outbreaks. NPR's Jonathan Lambert has the latest.
JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: On Friday, Africa CDC Director General Jean Kaseya stressed he's very concerned about this outbreak. It's already one of the largest Ebola outbreaks ever.
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JEAN KASEYA: This outbreak is very serious outbreak, and we need to treat that and to stop that now where it is.
LAMBERT: About a week ago, global health officials suspected that more than 1,300 people were sick with Ebola. At least 397 of those cases were confirmed, but hundreds of the suspected cases were ruled out by testing. That downward revision isn't unusual in the early days of an outbreak. Boghuma Titanji is an infectious disease physician at Emory University. She says that in early days, officials have fairly broad criteria for what defines a suspected case.
BOGHUMA TITANJI: Fever, diarrhea, vomiting - that could be malaria. That could be typhoid. But the initial case definition has to be broad in order to kind of try and cast as wide a net as possible.
LAMBERT: As the response ramps up, health officials start doing more to tease out whether a suspected case actually has Ebola. Now health officials are tracking at least 116 suspected cases.
TITANJI: It doesn't take away from the severity of the outbreak, but it makes it feel like, OK, there is a lot more ability to catch up.
LAMBERT: One sign of the response starting to catch up is this increase in testing. At the start, samples for testing had to be sent to Kinshasa, hundreds of miles from the epicenter of the outbreak in Northeast DRC. But over the past couple of weeks, labs closer to that epicenter have come online. Still, Titanji says that about 30% of tests are coming back positive.
TITANJI: What that tells me is that they're not testing enough.
LAMBERT: A high positivity rate means not enough testing is being done. Casting a wide net with testing means you're catching more cases. As a result, the outbreak is likely much larger than official numbers suggest. In fact, on Friday afternoon, the U.S. CDC released a model suggesting that if swift action isn't taken, this outbreak could rival the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak where 11,000 people died.
Jonathan Lambert, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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