Attacks Hinder Ebola Fight
BENI, Democratic Republic of Congo — When Ebola came to this city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Janvier Muhindo Mandefu quit farming and got work burying the highly contagious bodies of Ebola victims.
But Mr. Muhindo is less afraid of Ebola than of the mourners he encounters at funerals. He and his burial team have been attacked by relatives of the dead, one swinging a hoe. Mourners have accused team members of stealing the organs of corpses, and have threatened to throw them into the open graves.
In April, a mourner brandished a hand grenade, Mr. Muhindo said, sending everyone scattering and leaving a 3-year-old Ebola victim unburied.
“Someone like me can be buried alive,”
Mr. Muhindo said as others hosed down the trucks after another day of burials.
This Ebola outbreak in eastern
Congo, the second-largest ever recorded, is now spiraling out of control.
Despite some early success, the disease has come roaring back in the past three months.
Efforts to combat the epidemic have been hobbled by attacks on treatment centers and health workers; deep suspicion of the government, which is managing the eradication efforts; and growing mistrust of the international medical experts who have struggled to steer patients into the treatment centers.
When a doctor was killed, and treatment centers were attacked by gunmen or set on fire, health workers suspended their work. Some groups have pulled some of their personnel.
By mid-May, nearly 1,150 people had died, according to the World Health Organization. But that is an undercount, aid groups said.
When the outbreak was discovered last Efforts to contain a deadly virus are hampered by suspicions.
summer, health workers had reason to worry. This part of eastern Congo has long been beset by armed groups fighting over land, natural resources, ethnicity and religion — including one outfit with ties to the Islamic State.
Yet optimism ran strong among the arriving wave of health experts and humanitarian workers, many of whom had experience treating Ebola, an often fatal disease caused by a virus that is transmitted by body fluids.
They came with lessons learned from the outbreak that tore across West Africa starting in 2013, killing more than 11,000 people. And they were buoyed by a recent success: the containment of an outbreak in western Congo.
They also brought medical advances: a strikingly effective vaccine, experimental treatments, and a transparent container known as the “cube” that patients live inside, reducing the transmission risks.
The outbreak was in one of Congo’s most populous regions, and near the borders of three countries — Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan. And while Congo has had nine earlier recorded Ebola outbreaks, the disease had never been detected in the region until it showed up last year in a town called Mangina.
By late summer it had traveled down a dirt road to Beni, a city of about 350,000 that was reeling from massacres by machete that killed an estimated 800 people in recent years.
Some local politicians suggested that the government had imported the disease. In this independent region, only 2 percent of those recently surveyed said they trusted the national government in Kinshasa, 1,600 kilometers away.
“Scientifically, I don’t believe that it’s possible to first have the killings of people in Beni, and now this disease without them being related,” said Crispin Mbindule Mitondo, a member of the national assembly, in remarks broadcast on local radio and WhatsApp.
Ebola landed right ahead of a tight national election that was shaping up to be the first transfer of power by ballot in Congo since independence in 1960. But Kinshasa suspended voting in Ebola-affected areas in December, saying polling places might spread the disease.
This area was also an opposition stronghold. So for many, the announcement confirmed their suspicions that Ebola was part of a plot, managed by Kinshasa, to deny them their vote.
A day after the vote was canceled, protesters set an Ebola triage center in Beni on fire.
“When they canceled the elections, it was a disaster for us,” said Emmanuel Massart of Doctors Without Borders.
Adding to the suspicion, vaccination teams traveled under armed police or military escort. This made it appear that the Ebola response was an extension of an unpopular national government. And police officers and soldiers accompanying teams have opened fire during confrontations with grieving family members, according to interviews.
As the disease spread to Butembo, a city of about one million, patients who had Ebola resisted going to treatment centers, seeing them as a place to die rather than be cured.
Other patients who went to see their doctors with common symptoms, such as headaches, were forced into quarantine centers pending tests.
In February, an Ebola treatment center — this time in Katwa, an outlying area of Butembo and run by Doctors Without Borders — was also set on fire. Many of the patients fled into the night. Some of those too sick to flee were transferred to a nearby treatment center — which was in turn attacked.
In the days that followed, the response ground to a standstill in the epicenter of the outbreak. Doctors Without Borders pulled out of the city. When work resumed, the numbers of those infected began to rise — a pattern that would repeat.
For now, the outbreak is confined to a single region, largely thanks to the vaccine, doctors say. More than 110,000 people have been vaccinated, including front-line responders, which has slowed the spread.
Authorities in eastern Congo said on June 4 that at least 13 civilians were killed after rebels launched an attack in Beni.
“Can we stop the epidemic? Certainly we can,” said Mike Ryan, who runs the World Health Organization’s emergencies program. But to do so, he said, a political solution that reduced the violence was needed first.