Doctors go undercover to fight Ebola in eastern Congo
DAKAR, Senegal: Some doctors fighting the second-deadliest Ebola outbreak in history are afraid to wear scrubs.
They mask their identities to avoid harassment and violence in Congo, where the epidemic is spreading at the fastest rate since it started in August - and where rampant misinformation fuels a distrust of outsiders in medical garb. The World Health Organisation has logged 119 attacks this year against health workers. Eighty-five have been wounded or killed.
Fear is changing tactics among aid staffers, who set out to convince communities that Ebola is real and they were there to help end it. Now some downplay their mission in public, swapping white coats for street clothes and attention-grabbing SUVs for motorbikes that blend into traffic.
“Our staff has to lie about being doctors in order to treat people,” said Tariq Riebel, emergency response director in Congo for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a global aid group.
And the violence hampers the response effort in a more direct way: Ebola infections tend to spike after attacks, experts say, because emergency responders are forced to take cover and halt the distribution of immunityboosting vaccinations.
The death toll in the central African country reached 1,136 this week, government officials said. The infection count, meanwhile, has climbed to 1,632 - with 88 more suspected, Congo’s Ministry of Health said. Concerns are growing that the crisis in Congo’s North Kivu province could become as lethal as West Africa’s battle against the haemorrhagic fever from 2013 to 2016, which killed 11,310 people across three countries.
“The tragedy is that we have the technical means to stop Ebola, but until all parties halt attacks on the response, it will be very difficult to end this outbreak,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted May 10.
An April assault on a hospital killed a Cameroonian epidemiologist in the verdant city of Butembo, the outbreak’s current hot spot. The killing drove hundreds of Congolese doctors and nurses into the streets. They threatened to strike if the mayor did not support them with stronger security.
But a string of assaults followed.
A WHO team was attacked in early May after burying an Ebola victim. Five days later, dozens of gunmen stormed the team’s neighbourhood and exchanged bullets with security forces near their temporary homes.
Riebel, who oversees a team of about 100 IRC workers in Goma, said his staff had to suspend treatments last week after taking cover from gunfire in nearby streets.
The doctors don’t wear their uniforms in public because people throw rocks at them, he said, and they’ve stopped driving SUVs through town. Motorbikes draw less attention. “When our doctors try to find housing,” he said, “some say they are lawyers.”
After attackers killed WHO epidemiologist Richard Valery Mouzoko Kiboung in April, a city official told the Associated Press that armed fighters believed foreign health workers had started Congo’s epidemic.
“According to witnesses at the scene, these militiamen wanted all the expatriates to go home because, according to them, Ebola does not exist in Butembo,” said Patrick Kambale Tsiko, the deputy mayor of Butembo. “They said they will continue if these expatriates do not return as soon as possible.”
US officials are assessing the American role in curbing the crisis after sending a delegation - including Tim Ziemer, acting assistant administrator at the US Agency for International Development - to Congo this month to meet with Ebola experts on the ground, USAID acting spokesman Tom Babington said in an email. — Washington Post.