Health authorities in the United States have said that a medical missionary who contracted Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is being transported to Germany for treatment.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Tuesday that the patient would be treated at Charite University Hospital in Berlin following a US request for assistance.

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“Arrangements are currently being made to admit and treat the patient in Germany,” a spokesperson said.

The US citizen has been identified as Peter Stafford by the Serge Christian mission organisation. Global health authorities said on Tuesday that an outbreak of a rare kind of Ebola virus in the DRC and Uganda has killed more than 130 people, with more than 500 suspected cases.

World Health Organization (WHO) 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 anticipates the outbreak to last at least another two months.

In the US, Dr Satish Pillai, the incident manager for ⁠the CDC Ebola response, told reporters in a phone call that plans are being finalised to transport six other people considered to be high-risk contacts to Europe.

“The individuals are travelling to Europe, including in Germany, and they will be in quarantine during their monitoring period,” Pillai said, adding that one person would be going to the Czech Republic while the rest will go to Germany.

Pillai also emphasised that the current risk to the US from the outbreak remains low, saying that the CDC is coordinating with state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments.

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Jean-Jaques Muyembe, a virus expert at the DRC’s National Institute of Biomedical Research, said the country was expecting shipments of an experimental vaccine for different types of Ebola from the US and the United Kingdom.