On July 7, acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, sent an email to CDC employees saying that the agency’s Ebola outbreak response will last for several months and require more personnel, the Federal News Network reported.
“The coming months will require us to make hard decisions about how to prioritize work, especially programmatic activities in [CDC centers, institutes and offices],” he wrote in an email obtained by the news network. “We understand the challenges related to balancing program priorities and support for emergency responses, and we appreciate your leadership and flexibility in planning for how your CIO can support response needs.”
Dr. Bhattacharya is encouraging staff to enroll in the CDC Ready Responder program, which helps train emergency response, but staff said the agency must hire more scientists to meet the need of the Ebola outbreak and domestic outbreaks. This fiscal year, the CDC has only hired 38 people.
Here are four other Ebola updates.
1. On June 29, the CDC raised its Ebola outbreak designation to a level-1 response, which requires the “largest number of staff possible to work 24/7 on the response,” the email said. The last time the CDC had a level 1 activation was during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
2. The Ebola outbreak has 1,759 confirmed cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 600 deaths. New suspected cases have also been found in Tshopo province, which previously had no reported cases, ABC News reported.
3. Some physicians at the public hospitals in Congo are still on strike, saying they have not been paid since March, The Washington Post reported. Government officials in Ituri said the missing payments are because of the broader implications of the outbreak.
“The fact that Bunia airport is closed is hampering the very implementation of the response, particularly certain aspects of the flow of funds. This is one of the reasons that may account for the delay in payment,” Akilimali Pierre, the incident manager at Congo’s National Institute of Public Health, told the Associated Press.
4. About half of the public health employees returned to work July 8, unable to remain at home while patients went untreated. Some sources told the Post that during the strike, many patients stopped going to the hospital.
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