|
 Her recovery is testament to the effectiveness of a new treatment,
which isolates patients in futuristic cube-shaped mobile units with
transparent walls and gloved access, so health workers no longer
need to don cumbersome protective gear.
"I started to feel sick, with a fever and pain all over my body. I
thought it was typhoid. I took medicine but it didn't work," Nzavaki
told Reuters in Beni, a city of several hundred thousand, where
officials are racing to contain the virus.
"Then an ambulance came and brought me to hospital for Ebola
treatment. Now I praise God I'm healed."
The fight against Ebola has advanced more in recent years than in
any since it was discovered near Congo's eponymous river in 1976.
When the worst outbreak killed 11,300 people in West Africa in
2013-2016, there was no vaccine and treatment amounted to little
more than keeping patients comfortable and hydrated.
Now there's an experimental vaccine manufactured by Merck which this
year helped quash this strain of the virus on the other side of the
country in under three months, while three experimental treatments
have been rolled out for the first time.
Yet even the smartest science can do little about the marauding
rebel groups and widespread fear and mistrust that could yet scupper
efforts to contain Congo's tenth outbreak of the deadly hemorrhagic
fever. It is so far believed to have killed 90 people since July and
infected another 40.
The stakes are high, not just for health reasons: Ebola could
complicate the holding of a Dec. 23 election to replace President
Joseph Kabila that is already two years late, and would be Congo's
first democratic change of power.
REBELLION, FEAR, MISTRUST
The affected North Kivu and Ituri provinces have been a tinder box
of armed rebellion and ethnic killing since two bloody civil wars in
the late 1990s. Some areas near the epicenter require armed escorts
to reach because of insecurity. Two South African peacekeepers there
were wounded in a rebel ambush last week.
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And last week, authorities confirmed the first death from Ebola in
the major trading hub of Butembo, a city of almost a million near
the border with Uganda, dampening hopes that the virus was being
brought under control.
Insecurity aside, the biggest challenges the government faces could
be panic and downright denial, as they were during the catastrophic
West Africa outbreak.
"Ebola does not exist in Beni," resident Tresor Malala said, shaking
his head. "For a long time, people got sick with fever, diarrhea,
vomiting and they healed. Now someone gets a fever, they get sent to
the Ebola treatment center and then they die."
Taxi driver Mosaste Kala was equally skeptical: "The only people
dying are the ones going to the ... treatment center."
Tackling these perceptions will be crucial if authorities are to
halt the epidemic.
At a news conference on Saturday, Health Minister Oly Ilunga Kalenga
admitted that "community resistance is the first challenge to the
response to the epidemic".
In the district of Ndindi, in Beni, Ebola is spreading due to the
community's reluctance to cooperate with health workers, the
ministry says. Some locals have hidden sick relatives or refused to
be vaccinated.
The problem, says school teacher Alain Mulonda, many of whose pupils
were being kept at home by anxious parents, is that locals have
little understanding of Ebola.
"If the population of Beni continues to show this distrust," he
said, "this disease will consume the whole town."
(Additional reporting by Amedee Mwarabu in Kinshasa and Aaron Ross
in Dakar; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Tim Cocks and
David Evans)
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