‘It is heartbreaking’: panic in eastern DRC over return of Ebola

Bunia, where the first suspected case was reported. Photograph: Dirole Lotsima Dieudonne/AP

On Monday the Congolese health minister, Samuel Roger Kamba, said the government would open three treatment centres for Ebola in Ituri.

The WHO regional office for Africa said on Sunday that 35 experts from the organisation and seven tons of emergency medical supplies and equipment had arrived in Bunia.

Elsewhere in eastern DRC, one case was reported in rebel-controlled Goma, a woman who travelled to the city from Bunia where her husband had died of the disease.

Heather Kerr, the DRC country director at the International Rescue Committee, said the conflict in the region made containing the Ebola outbreak “all the harder”. “Eastern DRC’s years of conflict and displacement have left health systems on their knees,” she said. “With dozens of lives already lost and an already overstretched health system, we need to act fast.”

Manenji Mangundu, the DRC country director at Oxfam, said the outbreak was “hitting a country already stretched to breaking point” due to ongoing conflict and years of aid cuts.

First identified in 1976 in what is now the DRC, Ebola is a highly contagious and often fatal viral disease that affects humans and non-human primates. It spreads through body fluids or contaminated materials and causes organ damage, blood vessel impairment and sometimes severe internal and external bleeding.

WHO has said the current outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo variant, which has no approved treatment or vaccine. It is named after the district in western Uganda where it was first discovered in 2007.

Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, the director general of the National Institute of Biomedical Research in the DRC and a co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, said some candidate compounds for a Bundibugyo vaccine were expected to enter trials by the end of May or in June.

In the meantime, he said, the government was implementing public health preventive measures including protecting healthcare workers and treating cases based on symptoms. “This is how we brought the Bundibugyo strain outbreak under control in 2012 in Isiro, not far from Ituri,” he said.

This is the 17th Ebola outbreak in the DRC. From August 2018 to June 2020, the country recorded the second largest outbreak of the disease in history globally, and the country’s deadliest, centred in North Kivu and Ituri provinces. It caused more than 2,000 deaths.

In Ituri, authorities have to address enduring stigma and misconceptions and rumours associated with Ebola in fighting the disease, just as with past outbreaks. Kasuna, the Irumu resident, said: “Our people tend to believe in false myths rather than rely on scientific evidence. We need to raise awareness to save people’s lives.”