Angry residents of a town at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) attacked and burned a tent that was part of a health center where people are being treated for the virus, the staff there said Saturday. It was the second such attack in the region in a week.
No one was hurt in the attack, according to reports but as patients ran out to escape the fire, 18 people with suspected Ebola infections fled the facility and are unaccounted for, a hospital director said.
Angry residents arrived at the clinic in the town of Mongbwalu on Friday night and set fire to a tent set up for suspected and confirmed Ebola cases by the Doctors Without Borders (MSF), said Richard Lokudi, director of the Mongbwalu hospital.
Photo: AFP
“We strongly condemn this act, as it caused panic among the staff and also resulted in the escape of 18 suspected cases into the community,” he said.
On Thursday, another treatment center, in the town of Rwampara, was burned down after family members were banned from retrieving the body of a local man suspected to have died of Ebola.
The bodies of Ebola victims can be highly contagious and spread infection when people prepare them for burial and gather for funerals. Burying suspected victims is being managed wherever possible by authorities, sometimes protested by families and friends.
A communal burial for Ebola patients in Rwampara took place on Saturday under tight security as tensions between health workers and the local community ran high, said David Basima, a Red Cross team leader overseeing burials.
Armed soldiers and police monitored the burials as Red Cross workers clad in white protective suits lowered sealed coffins into the ground. Crying family members stood at a distance.
Basima said his team, after arriving at the scene, “experienced a lot of difficulties, including resistance from young people and the community.”
“We were forced to alert the authorities so that they could come to our aid, just for safety,” Basima said.
Authorities in northeastern DR Congo on Friday banned funeral wakes and gatherings of more than 50 people in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.
The WHO has said that the outbreak poses a “very high” risk for the DR Congo — up from a previous categorization of “high” — but that the risk of the disease spreading globally remains low.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday that 82 cases and seven deaths have been confirmed in the DR Congo, but that the outbreak is believed to be “much larger.”
There is no vaccine for the Bundibugyo virus, a rare type of Ebola, which spread undetected for weeks in the DR Congo’s Ituri province following the first known death, while authorities tested for another, more common, Ebola virus and came up negative. There are 750 suspected cases and 177 suspected deaths, although more are expected as surveillance expands.
Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said a response to the outbreak must include building trust with communities.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Saturday that three of its volunteers had died from the outbreak in Mongbwalu. The agency said it believed the three healthcare workers contracted the virus on March 27 while handling dead bodies as part of a humanitarian mission unrelated to Ebola.
If confirmed, this would significantly push back the timeline of the outbreak from the original first confirmed death in late April in the town of Bunia, the capital of Ituri.
US federal health officials said on Friday night that they are banning green card holders who have been in Ebola-affected countries from returning to the US
Green card holders are people who are not US citizens but have been granted authorization to live and work permanently in the US.
According to a US Federal Register notice on Friday, the US is enacting a rule that restricts green card holders who have recently been in the DR Congo, Uganda or South Sudan from reentering the US.
It is unclear why South Sudan was on the list, as the country has not confirmed any Ebola cases so far in this outbreak.
The ban is to ensure that Ebola screening, contact tracing, quarantine monitoring and medical monitoring would be available to US citizens, according to the notice.
The department did not respond to a request for comment.
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