The Trump Administration announced this week that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar would lead a delegation to three nations currently faced with one of the worst outbreaks of Ebola in world health history.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) — where the outbreak began and continues to ravage — Rwanda and Uganda will be visited. Government officials, U.S. embassy personnel, and World Health Organization leadership and employees will be involved in the discussions that follow. Accompanying Azar will be Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Garrett Grigsby, director of the DHHS Office of Global Affairs; Tim Ziemer, senior deputy assistant administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, and staff from the National Security Council.
The delegation’s goal is developing an insight to work and assess the situation as it is on the ground. The announcement follows news that the United States planned to fund another year of Ebola vaccine manufacturing, deploy CDC personnel to the DRC and support a clinical trial of Ebola therapeutics.
In the meantime, however, the outbreak has not slowed. At the end of last month, experts determined that more than 3,000 people have been infected by the disease and more than 2,000 killed by it since the outbreak began in August 2018. That outbreak has now reached the borders of the DRC.