Too many people in Ebola outbreak dying at home
BENI, Congo — Twomonthold Lahya Kathembo became an orphan in a day. Her mother succumbed to Ebola on a Saturday morning. By sunset her father was dead, too.
They had been sick for more than a week before health workers finally persuaded them to seek treatment, neighbors said. They believed their illness was the work of people jealous about their newborn daughter, a community organizer said, and sought the guidance of a traditional spiritual healer.
The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo is ravaging Beni, a sprawling city of some 600,000, in large part because so many of the sick are choosing to stay at home. In doing so, they unknowingly infect caregivers and those who mourn them.
“People are waiting until the last minute to bring their family members and when they do it’s complicated for us,” says Mathieu Kanyama, head of health promotion at the Ebola treatment center in Beni run by the Alliance for International Medical Action. “Here there are doctors, not magicians.”
Nearly one year into the outbreak, which has killed more than 1,700 and was declared a global health emergency this month, a rise in community deaths is fueling a resurgence of Ebola in Beni. During a twoweek period in July alone, 30 people died at home.
Health teams are now going doortodoor with megaphones to get the message out.
“Behind every person who has died there is someone developing a fever,” Dr. Gaston Tshapenda, who heads the Ebola response in Beni for Congo’s health ministry, told his teams.
Many people still don’t believe Ebola is real, health experts say, which stymies efforts to control the disease’s spread.
Ebola symptoms are also similar to common killers like malaria and typhoid, so those afraid of going to a treatment center often try to selfmedicate at home with paracetamol (a drug used to treat mild to moderate pain) to reduce fever.
But Ebola, unlike those other illnesses, requires the patient to be kept in isolation and away from the comfort of family.
Dr. Maurice Kakule, who became one of this outbreak’s first Ebola patients after he treated a sick woman at his clinic, is now trying to make it easier for those who are ill to get help in and around Beni, near the border with Uganda.
He and other survivors, who are now immune to the disease, run a motorcycle taxi ambulance. After receiving a phone call for help, they go to homes, reassure the sick and take them for medical care without infecting others.
The day after the deaths of baby Lahya’s parents, a morgue team in protective clothing carried their carefully encased bodies to a truck for a funeral procession to a cemetery on the edge of town.
Lahya developed a fever but has tested negative for Ebola. The infant with round cheeks and gold earrings is in an orphanage for now, while her 3yearold sister is being cared for by neighbors who hope to raise them both.