GENEVA, July 15 (Xinhua) -- Two United Nations agencies said Monday that a high-level meeting on the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) affirmed support for a government-led response and UN system-wide approach.
"Together with the government, we can and will end this outbreak. We have better public health tools than ever to respond to Ebola, including an effective vaccine," said the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
He said, however, "we need to see an end to the attacks and other disruptions to the response."
"We need political support from all parties, and community ownership, for the responders to do their work safely and without interruptions. This is the only way to stop the virus from continuing to spread," said the WHO chief.
He spoke after a meeting led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the WHO that followed Sunday's confirmation of the first case of Ebola in Goma, eastern DRC.
In a joint statement Monday, the UN said the outbreak is still confined to the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, but that the response is at a critical juncture.
"WHO assesses the risk of spread to neighboring provinces and countries as very high," the statement added.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock said: "We need to do everything possible now to avoid reaching the scale of the outbreak we saw in West Africa five years ago when more than 10,000 lives were lost before a multi-billion-dollar response brought the cases down to zero."
OCHA and the WHO said that 650 people have died in the current outbreak, while about 12 new cases are reported every day.
Almost 3,000 health workers have so far been vaccinated against the disease in Goma.
