“Authorities in northeastern Congo banned funeral wakes and gatherings of more than 50 people Friday in an effort to curb a rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in a region where medical workers have struggled with a lack of resources and pushback from angry residents,” reports Yahoo News.
Northeastern Congo is a war-torn region where many areas are controlled by violent militias. Over six million people have died in civil wars in eastern Congo since the late 1990s.
Earlier, an angry crowd set fire to a hospital after they were prevented from fetching the body of a deceased person infected with Ebola, which the crowd wished to give a traditional burial.
The World Health Organization said that the Ebola outbreak now poses a “very high” risk for Congo. The risk of a spread is high enough that people returning to the United States from the Congo now need to land and be screened at Washington-Dulles Airport in Virginia, even if they live in other parts of America.
“There is no available vaccine for the Bundibugyo virus, which spread undetected for weeks in Congo’s Ituri Province following the first known death while authorities tested for another, more common, Ebola virus and came up negative.”
There are 177 recorded deaths from Ebola in eastern Congo. Over a thousand villagers have died with Ebola-like symptoms, but many were never diagnosed with Ebola, and some deaths get labeled as diseases such as typhoid.
“We are trying to catch up,” said Congolese cabinet minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner. “It is a race against the clock.”
A news report says supplies are “being rushed to Ituri in the northeastern corner of the country, where nearly a million people have been displaced by armed conflicts over mineral resources. Ramping up contact tracing is a priority.”
In the provincial capital of Bunia, western journalists saw empty emergency treatment centers, while doctors in the nearby town of Bambu using expired medical masks while tending to Ebola patients.
“The provincial government said Friday it was temporarily banning wakes and gatherings of more than 50 people. It said funerals must be conducted in strict compliance with health protocols” that ordinary people are not familiar with. Trying to quell bad publicity, provincial officials also required journalists to obtain a permit to report on the Ebola outbreak, impeding their work.
Ebola has also spread to two provinces of the Congo further south south of Ituri — North Kivu and South Kivu, where the M23 rebel group funded by neighboring Rwanda controls many key cities, including Goma and Bukavu.
The rebel group said today it is setting up a crisis team to fight the outbreak. But it is not communicating with with the government of the Congo, which it is fighting.
