Congo’s response to Ebola is late and chaotic

[u/Zaghloul1919]

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/05/28/congos-response-to-ebola-is-late-and-chaotic

[u/AutoModerator]

Rules | Wiki | Flairs

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Zaghloul1919]

TO GRASP HOW hard it is to tackle Ebola in Ituri, the province in eastern Congo that is at the centre of the worst outbreak of the virus since 2018, consider recent events in the town of Mongbwalu. On May 24th young men attacked the local hospital four times in an effort to retrieve the corpse of a preacher who probably died of Ebola. The night before, arsonists had burned an isolation tent. When soldiers arrived and fired warning shots, dozens of patients fled in the chaos.

The lack of rapid tests and a licensed vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain mean that medics already faced an onerous task to curb an outbreak that went undetected for weeks. Realities on the ground in eastern Congo exacerbate the challenge. As of May 28th there were more than 1,000 suspected cases and around 250 suspected deaths in Congo; the true figures will be higher. There is rising concern of regional spread. Uganda, which shares a border with Ituri, has confirmed seven cases and one death. South Sudan, also on the province’s border, may follow soon. There is a widespread sense that the epidemic is moving faster than the response.

“We’ve faced fierce resistance, which has caused enormous damage,” says Richard Lokudi, the director of Mongbwalu hospital. Around a third of people surveyed in Ituri by ActionAid, an NGO, do not believe that Ebola is real. There is a deep lack of trust in an area where the state is weak, militias prey on the population, and almost 1m live in refugee camps. Some locals believe doctors are killing patients. They bristle when doctors tell them they must not all gather round and wash the corpse at a funeral, as local custom demands. Others think that NGOs have invented the disease to line their pockets. His staff have not been trained in how to handle Ebola patients safely, says Mr Lokudi. Nor is there money for petrol to drive around to look for the sick. Mongbwalu’s only ambulance now doubles as a hearse to take corpses to their graves. “It’s a bit of a mess,” he says.

Stopping Ebola requires several things to happen in concert. Communities need to be monitored for infection. Laboratories must confirm positive cases. Patients need to be isolated and managed, without health workers getting infected. Contacts need to be tracked and tested in turn.

None of this is going on to the extent required, whether in Ituri or the Congolese provinces of North and South Kivu, where other cases have been confirmed. The immediate problem is finding safe places to quarantine patients. “It’s been an extremely slow start,” says a UN official. “Surveillance is very, very, very weak. Case management is catastrophic.”

There are fears that some will seek to profit from the crisis. During the last big outbreak, which began in 2018, there were kickback schemes and sex-for-work scandals. Locals call such rackets “Ebola business”. Eyebrows were raised last week when the Congolese health agency leading the response from the capital, Kinshasa, asked donors for $240m—of which a whopping $74m would go towards “co-ordination”: that is, running its office.

Even if that money were to be spent wisely, working with Congolese officialdom is exasperating aid providers. On May 23rd the government banned nearly all flights in and out of Ituri’s capital, Bunia, where Ebola is circulating. Cargo and aid workers can theoretically still land, but each flight requires separate approvals from the health and transport ministries.

On May 26th, in a rare and telling sign of his displeasure with the central government, Johnny Luboya, the general who was appointed to run Ituri in 2021 because of its instability, called for flight restrictions to be eased. “The more we waste a day, the closer we get to disaster,” he said.