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Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service coming to live from London.

I'm Samantha Simmons.

We begin in Central Africa, where an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo

has been declared a

public health emergency of international concern. So far, more than 390 suspected cases have been

recorded with at least 100 deaths. The World Health Organization has said that the virus has

spread beyond the DRC, with two confirmed cases reported in neighbouring Uganda.

Two other neighbours, Rwanda and South Sudan, are also now on high alert.

The region is not unfamiliar with Ebola, with countries tackling regular outbreaks since the disease was discovered in 1976.

This is the 17th such outbreak in the DRC. The Africa Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention leads the continental response to Ebola outbreaks. Its director, Jean Kasea,

says he's on panic mode and told the World Service special care must be taken, especially around

funerals. Currently, we don't have vaccines, we don't have medicines.

We are mostly relying on public health measures.

It means providing appropriate information to population on how to handle the issue,

providing information to how to handle funerals because we don't want to see again people being

infected because of funerals.

Samuel Roger Kamba Malamba is the DRC's Minister of Public Health.

He gave this update on how the outbreak seems to have begun in the east of the country.

People in the community said it was witchcraft.

Now we realise that the first person fell ill in late April and died.

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