In Bukavu, the capital of the South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the consequences of the measures taken at the border with Rwanda are being felt.
In neighboring Rwanda, authorities announced that all foreign nationals who had travelled to or transited through the DRC in the past 30 days would be denied entry.
Rwandan nationals and foreign residents will be allowed to enter, provided they comply with quarantine measures.
When they close all the borders, famine spreads everywhere,” explains Jeanne Cikuru Sifa, a cross-border trader. Albert Mweze, a resident of Bukavu, says, “We depend on Rwanda. Before, to get dollars, we had to go to Rwanda. But now that the banks are closed… We don’t know what to do, so we suffer even more because of this disease.”
Countries neighboring the Democratic Republic of Congo are gravely threatened by the Ebola virus and must act without delay to combat this deadly virus, the director-general of the World Health Organization said on Monday.
"Countries bordering the DRC are particularly exposed and must take immediate action," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, adding that he would travel to the DRC on Tuesday, the vast Central African country at the heart of the current epidemic.
"The epidemic is spreading rapidly," Tedros said during a virtual ministerial meeting devoted to this viral hemorrhagic fever, which is transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can lead to severe bleeding and organ failure.
He stated that the current outbreak was "particularly difficult to manage."
"First of all, the delay in detecting the epidemic means that we now have to chase after an epidemic that is spreading very rapidly. We are urgently intensifying our operations, but for the moment, the epidemic is ahead of us," he said via video conference from Geneva.
On the other hand, the eastern provinces of the DRC, where the epidemic was first detected in mid-May, "are very unstable, with fighting having intensified in recent months, and the local population harbors great distrust of external authorities."
Third, he stressed, there was "no approved vaccine or treatment" against the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus, which is causing the current epidemic.
Since mid-May, the WHO has recorded 10 confirmed deaths from the Ebola virus and 220 suspected deaths in the DRC, as well as 900 additional suspected cases since Kinshasa declared the outbreak on May 15.
The United Nations agency said the true extent of the virus's spread — which experts suspect had been circulating in the shadows for some time — was probably much greater.
One death has been confirmed in neighboring Uganda, and six other cases of infection have been confirmed, after the Ministry of Health announced two new cases on Monday.
Ten other African countries are "threatened" by the infection, the African Union's health agency, Africa CDC, warned on Saturday.
These are Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.
Building trust
Jean Kaseya, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), said that "high mobility and insecurity" had contributed to the regional spread of the epidemic, which the WHO has declared an international health emergency.
Insecurity is a major obstacle in eastern DRC, a region plagued for three decades by conflicts involving a multitude of armed groups.
Public services have been virtually non-existent for decades in the rural areas of Ituri province.
The province of South Kivu is controlled by the armed group M23, which has never had to deal with an epidemic like Ebola.
Tedros said it was essential to address the lack of trust within communities affected by the Ebola virus.
Two hospitals in Ituri have been attacked by suspicious residents in the past five days: one in Mongbwala, where the outbreak was first detected, and the other in Rwampara, where tents used to isolate Ebola patients were set on fire.
The violence in Rwampara erupted after the family of a deceased man was refused the right to take his body for burial, due to the risk of contamination.
Relatives rush to the bodies, touch them... while organizing funeral rites that bring together a crowd of people," Jean Marie Ezadri, a civil society leader in Ituri, told AFP last week.
Tedros said that the WHO was injecting funds, medical equipment and personnel into the DRC to support the authorities and accelerate clinical trials on potential treatments.
"The situation will get worse before it gets better," he said. "But we know this virus and we know how to stop it."
