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Last week, something happened that was announced but will not happen. The Ebola epidemic, which has slowly but surely developed in northeastern Congo since August, has spread to neighboring Uganda. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a five-year-old Congolese girl traveling with her family was the first Ebola victim in Uganda. Then the five-year-old grandmother died. On Friday, the WHO crisis meeting took place and announced the same day that the Ebola outbreak was an "extraordinary event, threatened with international spread". WHO has not declared an international health crisis, but will assess the situation on an ongoing basis.
Meanwhile, several neighboring Congo countries have recently put in place crisis measures to deal with any international Ebola outbreak.
The World Health Organization has declared only four times an international health crisis. The first time, it was in 2003 when a flu virus infected by humans from poultry to humans in East Asia. The so-called bird flu has revealed the need for an international response to epidemics. The flu virus knows, as we know, no borders and moves quickly in the interconnected world of today. A few years later, we had another influenza epidemic, the swine flu. Thus, in 2014, an outbreak of Ebola was reported in three West African countries shortly after the spread of Zika virus in Latin America. For each of these declared international crises, WHO and each of the Member States have been somewhat better at solving them. If an international health crisis is declared, measures will be put in place, for example at border crossing points and at airports. And, of course, the focus is more on assisting areas that are all affected.
We have never been as well equipped to cope with the epidemics as today. We have the knowledge and we have developed the drugs. After 2015, this also applies to Ebola. We also know how communities respond to epidemics like Ebola, how they go through stages of denial, fear and sometimes panic. In the case of the Ebola virus, we also know that these reactions can be as lethal as the virus itself. When the Ebola virus killed just over 10,000 people in West Africa in 2014 and 2015, many people died because they were left on their own. The virus has also spread more than it should have, because family members often hide the sick. This ebola epidemic resulted in the development of a vaccine, but it was equally important to develop methods to track patients and build trust in communities that were suspicious of government authorities.
Because, during this last epidemic, skepticism was not less, it served as an engine for the spread of the virus. The spread in Uganda comes after the number of people infected in the Congo hit by bad weather in May. One of the reasons is that people wait the longest time to see a health care provider. This contributes to the high mortality rate of this epidemic, of which more than 2,000 have already died and more than 1,400 are already infected. Late monitoring of patients also means that more people in their immediate environment are infected. In addition, the Congo is hit by a serious surge of mistrust and skepticism.
In late April, Cameroonian doctor Richard Valery Kiboung, deployed by the WHO, was shot dead at Butembo University Hospital in north-eastern Congo. Kiboung was an epidemiologist and coordinated the province's response to the Ebola virus when unknown perpetrators stormed the hospital and attacked the staff. This was one of many attacks in hospitals and clinics in the area. Although the authors also took equipment, they may have been motivated by the increasing skepticism that health professionals experienced during this outbreak. Those who follow patients and health professionals are now risking their lives and are under the protection of the UN's Congo-based force. Skepticism is partly due to local political conditions and partly to the proliferation of conspiracy theories about health workers and international humanitarian organizations. These are regions of Congo that have been troubled for twenty years, the people who live there have little or no reason to trust in the government of the country. Conflict is an effective vector of mistrust and conspiracy theories. This did not improve the Kinshasa authorities' attitude of canceling last year's elections in the northeastern provinces. According to the theories disseminated via messaging services such as WhatsApp, Ebola is a fervor to prevent the inhabitants of the Northeast to participate in its political life.
In Uganda, you were ready, the country has already succeeded in stopping several minor outbreaks of Ebola. And this time, everything had started vaccinating the health staff. This has also been done on the south side of the Sudanese border, despite the fact that the region is an active war zone. But the challenge lies in the epidemic of the epidemic, in the northeast corner of Congo. With the experiences of West Africa in baggage, WHO has adopted new methods. We met with village councils, priests, traditional healers and imams. Social media campaigns have been launched to put an end to conspiracy theories and rumors. If there is something here to learn for the rest of us, it is that skepticism kills, that information and trust can be as important as drugs and drugs. vaccines. The fact that it is not a particular Congolese problem shows our own challenges in the face of new epidemics of diseases that we should have eradicated. In the first two months of this year, 34,000 people in Europe were sick with measles. The epidemic is largely due to skepticism towards a well-proven vaccine and conspiracy theories of medicine. Most cases of measles in Europe have been reported in Ukraine, that is, another area characterized by turmoil and daily infiltration of news by conspiracy theories. However, the growing skepticism about vaccines at home, which has led to the number of measles infections having jumped, shows that we are also not immune. As for serious diseases, they can kill both in Congo and here. If that does not bother us.
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