Goma (DR Congo) (AFP)
The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Monday that the confirmed case of Ebola found in Goma, the big city in eastern DRC affected by the disease, was "a warning" about the dangers of this epidemic. .
"Goma is a warning," WHO emergency officer Mike Ryan told reporters in Geneva. The teams responding to the outbreak identified 60 contacts of the Evangelical pastor who became ill and "vaccinated 30 of them".
In the DRC, the authorities have been stepping up prejudices and calls for calm since the discovery of the first case of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in Goma on Sunday.
First step: the patient, a man presented as a pastor of a Christian church, was evacuated Monday morning to Butembo from where he had arrived the day before to the capital of North Kivu province with about a million of inhabitants.
Explanation: The Butembo Ebola Treatment Center (ETC), the epicenter of the epidemic, is better prepared than the one in Goma that has not yet handled any cases so far, said the governor, Carly Nzanzu Kasivita.
"The case was not only detected early, but also isolated immediately avoiding any additional contamination," says the governor.
Both the governor and the health ministry are calling on the people of Goma to keep their "calm" in the face of the epidemic on their doorstep.
This epidemic, which has left 1,665 dead, has so far been confined to the north of the province, in the areas of Beni-Butembo, since it was officially declared on August 1st near Beni.
The patient's itinerary is enough to feed the more or less rational anxieties surrounding each contagious and deadly disease.
Originally from South Kivu, the pastor arrived in early July in Butembo, where he presented the first symptoms as early as Tuesday, July 9.
"During his stay in Butembo, the pastor preached in seven churches," where he regularly touched the faithful "including the sick," says the Ministry of Health.
The pastor, who would be a member of an evangelical church called "Awakening", then took Friday the 12th the road to Goma aboard a bus with 18 other passengers and the driver.
"The bus went through three health check points, and during the checks it did not seem to show signs of the disease, and at each checkpoint it wrote different names on the passenger lists indicating probably his will to hide his identity and health, "reports the Ministry of Health.
- Meeting in Geneva -
"As soon as he arrived in Goma this Sunday morning, he went to a health center because he was not feeling well and started having a fever.No other patient was in the health center, reducing the risk of nosocomial infections of other people ", says one.
According to another unnamed source, the man used a motorcycle taxi to go to one of his friends beforehand.
The concern is palpable in Goma, a city shared between its villas with magnificent views of Lake Kivu, headquarters of the United Nations and NGOs, and its densely populated neighborhoods with significant commercial activity.
"Goma is very populated, I fear that the spread is fast.The authorities are doing everything to find all these people because Goma is a great crossroads to several destinations," worries a motorcycle taxi, Jean-Pierre, 30 .
The city lies on the border of Rwanda, with a port from which boats leave for Bukavu and South Kivu, and an airport with civil or UN flights to Kinshasa, Entebbe and Addis Ababa.
"We have worked hard to ensure that any case in Goma is identified and to provide an immediate response," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adahom Ghebreseyus.
"This confirmed case of Ebola in Goma shows that the situation remains worrying and that the epidemic is still not under control," said Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which stopped its interventions in Beni-Butembo because of the 'insecurity.
The insecurity has also hit Beni where two local notables, enlisted in preventive actions, were murdered in the night from Saturday to Sunday.
The intervention of community leaders is intended to remove the resistance of populations against vaccination, hospitalization and burial methods that avoid contact with contagious fluids of the deceased.
"According to several sources, the attackers are people from the same neighborhood as the two victims, who envied their neighbors because they had found a job in the response to Ebola," said the Ministry of Health.
An epidemiologist from the World Health Organization (WHO) was killed on April 20 in Butembo, where two Ebola treatment centers (ETCs) were attacked in late February-early March.
This epidemic is the second largest Ebola outbreak in history after killing nearly 11,000 people in West Africa (Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone) in 2013-2014.
© 2019 AFP