Women and children are often the first to be displaced by the bloodshed.Īt the Ebola treatment centre in Beni, a city of several hundred thousand with close ties to neighbouring Uganda, five members of the same family of farmers were being treated for Ebola in late March. This is Congo’s tenth Ebola outbreak, but it is the first in the densely populated provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, where militias carry out sporadic raids from hidden strongholds in the tropical forest. But these efforts have been hindered by outbreaks of violence and a deep mistrust of outsiders.
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After caring for them, we had to remove the gloves, but the patient had touched almost all the doors.”Ī key part of the Ebola response effort involves decontaminating health facilities, educating health workers on how to protect themselves and their patients, and persuading residents to seek treatment at specialised centres. “When we received patients, we just had to put on protective gloves. “We didn’t have much equipment in this facility,” said Mungwayitheka, who now works at an Ebola treatment centre in Beni he credits with saving his life. “They don’t sterilise their equipment, and they don’t decontaminate beds, and they don’t change sheets.”Īnselme Mungwayitheka said he and two other health workers at a private clinic in Beni caught Ebola from a woman and her newborn who were infected while in the care of a traditional healer. “It means at times they don’t change gloves or don’t use single-use ones or simply they don’t use gloves at all,” said Jessica Ilunga, a ministry spokeswoman. But health workers operating outside of government hospitals do not always follow guidelines to prevent cross-contamination, according to Congo’s health ministry. The virus is transmitted through contact with infected bodily fluids. Healthcare standards in Congo vary widely due to lack of oversight over a system that includes many unregistered private clinics and traditional healers operating out of their homes. “Unfortunately, women and children have been the unwitting victims of that reality.” “Transmission within the healthcare setting has been a major factor driving this outbreak,” Ryan said. Malaria can cause severe complications in pregnant women and children, requiring treatment at medical facilities where they risk exposure to undiagnosed Ebola patients, said Mike Ryan, who heads the WHO’s health emergencies programme. But experts suspect it may be because the Beni area, where the outbreak began in August, was also battling malaria at the time. The reason more women and children have fallen sick remains a bit of a mystery. But in this outbreak, women and girls account for 58% of cases, down from a peak of 62% in December, the WHO said. An employee lamented the frequency of orders.Įbola cases would typically be divided more or less equally between male and female patients. In the city centre, small coffins wrapped in flowery plastic were stacked outside a carpenter’s shop.
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Alongside blankets and spare clothes stand shelves full of baby formula and neon-coloured plastic rattles in the shape of little bears. The contents of the storage room at the Butembo treatment centre attest to the age of many of the patients. More than 11,000 people in all died in that outbreak. As of May 26, the death toll stood at 1,281 people, including at least 541 who were under 18.įatality rates are highest for children under 4 who died at a rate of around 80% in West Africa, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015. More than two out of every three children infected in this outbreak have died compared with just over half the adults, the WHO said. Their small bodies are less well equipped to cope with extreme fluid loss brought on by common symptoms such as diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and bleeding, said Daniel Bausch, an infectious disease specialist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Young children and babies are especially vulnerable.
The disease can progress rapidly, crippling the immune system and shutting down vital organs. More than a quarter of the confirmed and probable cases identified as of early April were children under 15, compared to 18% in the last major outbreak in West Africa in 2013-2016, according to figures compiled by the World Health Organization.
The Ebola outbreak in Congo - the second-largest on record - has inflicted an unusually heavy toll on children.
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