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GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo, April 24 (Reuters) – Health officials from one of the epicentres of the Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have threatened Wednesday to go on strike next week if the authorities do not do more to protect their.
Repeated attacks on treatment centers by armed militiamen and community members who believe the Ebola virus is a conspiracy against them hindered the response to the second most deadly haemorrhagic fever epidemic in history .
During the latest attack, against a hospital in Butembo town, a Cameroonian epidemiologist from the World Health Organization (WHO) was killed and two others wounded last Friday.
At a protest on Wednesday in Butembo, the largest city affected by the current epidemic, dozens of Congolese doctors and nurses paraded behind a banner saying "Ebola exists" and urged the authorities to take additional security measures.
"If our security is not guaranteed, we will strike in the first week of May," said Dr. Kalima Nzanzu, citing a memo to Butembo Mayor Sylvain Kanyamanda.
Kanyamanda told Reuters that he understood the frustrations of the health workers and that the government was determined to meet their demands.
The last Ebola outbreak, declared last August and the tenth of the Congo since the discovery of the virus in 1976, reportedly killed 880 people and infected nearly 500 others in the North Kivu and Libya provinces. , Ituri.
The North Kivu military prosecutor's office announced Wednesday that the authorities had captured the alleged leader of the attack attack last week, as well as a dozen other suspects. .
Prosecutors believe that the attackers belong to an armed group called Patriotic Union for the Liberation of Congo (UPLC), based on a leaflet left at the hospital threatening health workers.
Dozens of militias are active in the border areas of eastern Congo with Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, where they run lucrative snowshoes and fight for land, ethnicity and mineral resources . (Report by Fiston Mahamba, additional report by Stanis Bujakera in Kinshasa, written by Aaron Ross, edited by Hugh Lawson)
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