Health workers fighting Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) have run into an invisible, but powerful hurdle — a belief system that deems the disease to be a curse or the result of evil spirits.
Some people are refusing medical care and turn instead to preachers and prayers to chase away the threat, they said.
The pastor of an evangelical church died on Wednesday last week, several days after he prayed for an Ebola victim who went to him for help, a doctor said.
Photo: AP
“Some sick people believe that the Ebola epidemic comes from sorcery — they refuse to be treated and prefer to pray,” said Julie Lobali, a nurse on the front line against the DR Congo’s ninth Ebola outbreak.
She is working in a hospital in Mbandaka, a port city on the Congo River where the first urban case was reported on Thursday last week.
Since the outbreak was declared in the remote area of Bikoro on May 8, 51 cases of Ebola have been reported with 27 deaths.
One superstition that has become prevalent in the city is believing that Ebola began in Bikoro as “a curse on those who ate stolen meat” — a wild animal hunted in the countryside, she said.
Blandine Mboyo, who lives in Bongondjo District, said that “a hunter put a curse on the village because his big game was stolen.”
“This curse is so powerful because it hits those who ate this meat, having heard about the theft or having seen the stolen animal,” local vendor Nicole Batoa added.
Another resident, Guy Ingila, said that officials have said on the radio “this disease is incurable... It’s because it’s about witchcraft.”
For doctors and health officials, these beliefs raise serious concerns, complicating efforts to contain and roll back the virus.
In Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday, African health officials said they were preparing to send anthropologists to the DR Congo to help with the vaccination campaign.
A prototype vaccine is to first be given to front-line health workers and then to people who have been in contact with Ebola patients.
“If we do not handle communication well, the vaccination program may suffer,” Africa Centers for Disease Control head John Nkengasong told reporters in Geneva. “So we are also assessing how in the next two weeks or so to deploy anthropologists to support the vaccine efforts.”
In the DR Congo, as elsewhere in Africa, disease and death are often not looked on as natural phenomena, “so many deaths is a sign of a curse and can only have been provoked by a bad spirit,” said Zacharie Bababaswe, a Congolese specialist in cultural history.
Before the expansion of evangelical churches in the nation, many Congolese would see the witch doctor or village healer for treatment, Bababaswe said.
Today, there is still widespread superstition — but, since the 1980s, it has taken a different form, with some people turning for help to a church or a pastor who claims to have healing powers.
Two people infected with Ebola from Bikoro went to the churches rather than a medical center for help, local witnesses said.
Another patient, who had been hospitalized in Mbandaka, left the medical center to seek out a local healer, they said.
To brake the spread of Ebola, “we have to convince villagers that the disease is not a curse,” Bikoro official Bavon N’Sa Mputu said, adding that churches can play a key role in this.
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