CDC director says it could take another year to control Ebola outbreak

CDC Director Robert Redfield said late last week that controlling the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo could take a year or more, a bleaker prediction than that from the WHO director-general, who hoped that the crisis could be stopped in the next six months. The two leaders had recently returned from a trip to the DRC. “I would love to see this outbreak end in six months,” Redfield told STAT. “But I think the reality, the practical reality, is this is going to be a longer road. And we need to start planning for it.” One such plan, Redfield told NPR, involves assigning nearly a dozen health experts to the DRC for a year, some of whom will work much closer to the epicenter of the outbreak than previous CDC teams. So far, there have been 951 cases and 598 deaths, making it the second largest Ebola outbreak on record.