A field coordinator for humanitarian group Oxfam warned on Tuesday that supplies of clean water — the “first line of defense” against the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) — are “simply not available.”
Contaminated water could be one reason case numbers are increasing despite massive health resources deployed to the outbreak region.
Oxfam’s Manel Rebordosa told Sky News on Tuesday that the eastern Ituri province and its mining town Mongbwalo — which is ground zero for the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak — have a nightmarish combination of transient residents, poor water quality, terrible personal hygiene, and persistent problems with disposing of human waste.
“Miners working in the surrounding areas have no toilets and handwashing stations. Then they return home to communities already battling the virus,” he explained. “Clean water costs $2 for 20 litres. For most families here, that is far beyond what they can afford.”
Rebordosa also complained about the difficulty of contact tracing, which he said was exacerbated by U.S. funding cuts.
“One month into the 2018 outbreak, healthcare workers achieved contact tracing rates where nearly eight in 10 known contacts were successfully monitored. Today, following the withdrawal of the US funding for disease surveillance and severe funding shortfalls, contact tracing is reaching fewer than half of the contacts,” he said.
“That gap is not just a statistic; it is a painful reality that allows the virus to spread undetected through communities,” he maintained.
Rebordosa said funding cuts have also forced humanitarian organizations to scale back their “outreach services,” which are seen as vital for spreading information to the notoriously fragmented, restless, and superstitious people of the eastern Congo.
“When trusted community outreach teams disappear, rumors spread faster than the virus. People now fear healthcare facilities, which they see as death traps. Families are turning to traditional remedies, which risks delaying treatment and allowing the virus to spread further,” he said.
“Every day without funding, the virus takes more lives,” he concluded.
The U.S. State Department last week announced an additional $20 million in funding for the Ebola response effort, which brought total spending up to $220 million for Ebola alone, on top of $350 million in humanitarian aid for the DRC, South Sudan, and Uganda.
U.S. funding for Ebola in the DRC and its neighbors explicitly included “contact tracing, border and point of entry screening,” and “community education to combat misinformation about how Ebola spreads.”
“The United States continues to be the largest financial contributor to the Ebola response,” the State Department noted.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in its latest update that the current outbreak “is now the largest caused by the Bundibugyo virus.”
Bundibugyo is a relatively rare strain of Ebola that has only figured in two previous outbreaks: Uganda in 2007 and the DRC in 2012. The town of Bundibugyo in Uganda lent its name to this Ebola strain during the 2007 outbreak, a dose of infamy the residents are not happy about, since they have reported no Ebola cases since then.
The CDC counted 808 confirmed Ebola cases in the DRC and 19 in Uganda as of Sunday — a record for the Bundibugyo strain, but nowhere near the 3,470 cases in the 2018 outbreak mentioned by Oxfam’s Rebordosa, or the 28,600 cases in the largest outbreak to date, which affected Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone between 2013 and 2016.
The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Monday praised Uganda’s response to the outbreak, which included a specialized Ebola treatment unit that was spun up within six hours of the outbreak’s declaration.
W.H.O. noted that Uganda has been involved in a total of nine Ebola outbreaks and has gained valuable experience about battling the disease — which W.H.O. implicitly pleaded with the DRC to study.