Illegal doctors fight the Ebola virus in eastern Congo

DAKAR, Senegal – Some doctors who are battling the second Ebola outbreak, the deadliest in history, are afraid to wear scrubs.

They mask their identities to avoid harassment and violence in the Congo, where the epidemic is spreading at the fastest pace since its appearance in August – and where widespread misinformation is fueling mistrust of foreigners. matter of medicine. The World Health Organization has recorded 119 attacks against health workers this year. Eighty-five were injured or killed.

Fear is changing the tactics among the aid staff, who are trying to convince communities that the Ebola virus is real and that they were there to help stop it. Now, some are downplaying their mission in public, swapping white coats for catchy city clothes and SUVs for motorcycles merging into traffic.

"Our staff has to lie about doctors treating people," said Tariq Riebel, director of emergency interventions in Congo for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a global aid group. .

And violence hampers the response effort in a more direct way: Ebola infections tend to multiply, according to experts, because rescue teams are forced to protect themselves and put an end to the distribution of vaccines that enhance immunity.

The deaths in Central African country reached 1,136 people this week, government officials said. The number of cases of infection, meanwhile, soared to 1,632 – with 88 additional suspects, said the Congo Ministry of Health. The crisis in North Kivu province, Congo, could become as lethal as the battle of West Africa against haemorrhagic fever from 2013 to 2016, which killed 11,310 people in three countries .

"The tragedy is that we have the technical means to stop Ebola, but until all parties put an end to attacks on the response, it will be very difficult to end this epidemic," said the Director-General. from the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, May 10.

A Cameroonian epidemiologist was attacked in April in a hospital in the green town of Butembo, the hotspot of the home. The assassination led hundreds of Congolese doctors and nurses to the streets. They threatened to strike if the mayor did not support them with increased security.

But a series of assaults followed.

A team from the WHO was attacked in early May after burying an Ebola victim. Five days later, dozens of gunmen stormed the team quarter and traded bullets with security forces near their temporary home.

Riebel, who oversees a team of about 100 IRC workers in Goma, said his staff had had to suspend treatments last week after being shielded from blows. fire drawn in the neighboring streets.

Doctors do not wear their uniforms in public because people throw stones at them, he said, and they stopped driving all-terrain vehicles in town. Motorcycles attract less attention. "When our doctors try to find housing," he said, "some say they are lawyers."

After the attackers killed the WHO epidemiologist Richard Valery Mouzoko Kiboung in April, a city official told the Associated Press that armed fighters believed that foreign health workers had triggered the attack. Congo epidemic.

"According to witnesses on the spot, these militiamen wanted all expats to return home because, according to them, Ebola does not exist in Butembo," said Patrick Kambale Tsiko, deputy mayor of Butembo. "They said they would continue if these expats did not return as soon as possible."

US officials assess the role of the US in managing the crisis after sending a delegation – including Tim Ziemer, acting deputy administrator at the US Agency for International Development – at Congo this month to meet experts on the Ebola virus in the field, said USAID interim spokesman Tom Babington in an email.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called on Ebola experts from North Kivu last year after an armed group attacked a Congolese military site along a road located in near the place of passage of the team.

The CDC has 17 people in the cities of Kinshasa and Goma but hopes to expand its intervention team in Congo to 40, said CDC director Robert Redfield in an interview Wednesday. The timing will depend on the approval by the State Department of security measures for these experts.

"The response to the epidemic does not succeed despite all efforts," he said.

Redfield said the additional staff for Goma anticipated the relocation of new cases to the city, which is home to more than one million people and provides direct flights to major transit centers, including Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, and Entebbe, Uganda.

Redfield said that a long-term plan was to be put in place, adding that it could take up to two years. "We make a mistake by underestimating the complexity of this epidemic," he said.

The experts urge the world community to devote more resources to Congo's struggle. "We are at a critical juncture," said Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who traced the epidemic. "Violent attacks are gaining and infections are not controlled."

According to a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, more than 140 armed groups operated last year in the provinces of North and South Kivu.

"We need to call the situation as it is," said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior academic at the Johns Hopkins Center for Sanitary Security. "Countries will be forced to act if the epidemic spreads across [Congo’s] borders, but at that time, the cost of the response will be much higher and the prospects for containment will be much more difficult. "

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Sun reported from Atlanta.