Bush meat and cross-border visits are both off the table for Jenti Gabriel Mambuku, a mother of eight living in a South Sudanese market town a short bus-ride from neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo).
The reason: the DR Congo’s worst-ever Ebola outbreak that has claimed 460 lives since August last year. The last time the deadly hemorrhagic virus went transnational in 2014, it killed more than 11,000 people in three West African countries.
The outbreak has put war-torn South Sudan on high alert, with health workers being vaccinated and residents being taught how to avoid infection. In Mambuku’s town, Yambio, that means forgoing trips to see family in the DR Congo and avoiding local delicacies like monkey, zebra and antelope meat.
“I told my children that we cannot continue eating bush meat or any dry meat because we fear that the Ebola is very near now,” the 35-year-old said in an interview on the outskirts of Yambio.
Human infections of Ebola in Africa have been associated with hunting, butchering and processing of meat from infected animals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2002, the WHO linked an outbreak of Ebola in Gabon to an infected gorilla.
Yambio is situated in a dense forest within about 40km of the border with the DR Congo, where residents source so-called bush meat. In the past, inhabitants of the town and surrounding areas simply walked across the border to visit relatives on the other side, often bringing fresh supplies with them.
Those trips are being curbed because of the Ebola outbreak, said Victor Diko, a Yambio county official who is supervising efforts to prevent the disease from spreading.
The outbreak in the DR Congo is in two provinces: North Kivu, which borders Rwanda and Uganda, and Ituri, along the boundaries with Uganda and South Sudan.
“The risk of Ebola spreading here is very high because of the very many porous border points which are not monitored,” Diko said in an interview.
South Sudan is ill-equipped to mount an emergency response to a disease outbreak. Five years of civil war that erupted in December 2013 and may have killed almost 400,000 people has stretched the nation’s health facilities to near breaking point.
“Coupled with insecurity and inaccessibility, an outbreak of Ebola virus disease in South Sudan can potentially be devastating with immense human suffering and a high number of deaths,” said Helene Sandbu Ryeng, a spokeswoman for the UNICEF. “Prevention is paramount.”
The UN has appealed for US$16.3 million to help set up systems needed to prevent the disease from spreading to South Sudan, which has had three previous outbreaks of the disease. The Ebola response in West Africa in 2014 to 2016 cost more than US$3.6 billion.
The area along the Congolese border lacks adequate mobile-phone networks that would allow health workers to carry out prevention campaigns by SMS, Ryeng said.
That, coupled with low literacy levels, has forced community members to hold meetings with small groups of people to sensitize them to the threat the disease poses.
The message is getting through.
“I am scared to visit my relatives who are across the border because I fear I can contract Ebola,” Mambuku said. “They are also not coming to us because we don’t want them to bring the disease here.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
RSS