Congo’s ebola crisis at ‘tipping point’
Health workers in the DRC may be assigned armed guards as they try to stop the ebola virus from spreading across borders.
Health workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo may be assigned armed guards as they try to stop the Ebola virus from spreading across borders.
“The Ebola outbreak is at tipping point,” Rory Stewart, Britain’s International Development Secretary, told The Sunday Times.
“It is no longer just a medical emergency. It is a political and a security crisis. This disease not only poses a threat to the region in Africa, but ultimately potentially to Europe and the UK.”
More than 100 militias operate in North Kivu, where the disease is spreading and six million people are displaced. It has claimed 1240 lives, fewer so far than the one in West Africa that killed 11,000 in 2014-16, but this is the first to coincide with a military conflict, which is hampering efforts to contain it.
Harriett Baldwin, the British government’s minister for Africa, will visit the region this week, as fears grow the disease could spread into Goma, a city of a million people on the border with Rwanda.
Rwanda and Uganda, another neighbouring country, have direct flights to Britain.
The viral haemorrhagic fever causes internal bleeding and spreads rapidly via contact with small amounts of bodily fluid, making it highly contagious.
When Ebola emerged in eastern Congo last August, health workers were confident of containing it, setting up checkpoints to take people’s temperatures and facilities for washing hands.
Yet ignorance and fear have combined to make foreign relief teams the enemy. A doctor from the World Health Organisation was shot dead in a hospital and burial workers at Ebola funerals have been attacked amid complaints about not being able to wash the bodies of the dead according to local tradition.
Two clinics run by Medecins Sans Frontieres were burnt down in February and March, sending Ebola patients fleeing to the villages, where they infected others. MSF had to suspend operations at the outbreak’s centre.
“There is a deep, deep mistrust of responders,” said Simon O’Connell, executive director of Mercy Corps, a UK-based global relief agency. “We’ve had stones thrown at our vehicles.”
The UN has appointed an Ebola “tsar” and is considering providing armed escorts for health workers, but many fear this could raise tensions, arguing instead for more efforts to win over local communities.
“Lack of trust is the biggest problem,” said Yolande Wright of the British Department for International Development, who recently visited the region.
She complained of “inappropriate use of force” by Congolese authorities, referring to reports of infected people being forced into ambulances at gunpoint. As a result of such tactics, most of the infected would rather die at home, posing a threat to their families.
The Sunday Times
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