A medical missionary who contracted Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is being transported to Germany for treatment, U.S. health authorities confirmed Tuesday, as the outbreak's death toll climbed above 130.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the patient, identified by the Serge Christian mission organization as Peter Stafford, would be treated at Charite University Hospital in Berlin following a U.S. request for assistance.
"Arrangements are currently being made to admit and treat the patient in Germany," a CDC spokesperson said.
Dr. Satish Pillai, the CDC's incident manager for the Ebola response, said plans are being finalized to transport six additional people considered high-risk contacts to Europe. One person will go to the Czech Republic; the rest will go to Germany. All will be in quarantine during their monitoring period.
"The individuals are travelling to Europe, including in Germany, and they will be in quarantine during their monitoring period," Pillai said.
Pillai added that the current risk to the United States from the outbreak remains low and that the CDC is coordinating with state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments.
The WHO's Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was "deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic." The leader of the WHO's team in the DRC said she expects the outbreak to last at least another two months.
Jean-Jaques Muyembe, a virus expert at the DRC's National Institute of Biomedical Research, said the country is expecting shipments of an experimental vaccine from the United States and the United Kingdom.
Separately, the U.S. government confirmed it will allow the DRC's national football team to enter the country for the World Cup, even though it has banned non-Americans who have visited the DRC, Uganda, or South Sudan in the past 21 days from entering. A senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, that the team had been training in Europe and may not have been subject to the ban in any case.
"We expect the DRC team to be able to attend the World Cup," the official said.
If any players had been in the DRC within the last 21 days, they would be subject to the same testing and isolation protocols required of returning U.S. citizens, the official said. The exemption does not extend to DRC fans hoping to travel to the United States to watch the games.
The DRC opens its World Cup campaign against Portugal in Texas on June 17. According to Al Jazeera, the DRC is the only one of the three countries covered by the entry ban to have qualified for the tournament.
