Libreville (AFP)
Patients evicted by their owners, nurses left by their husbands, names of case contacts thrown into the pasture on social networks: in sub-Saharan Africa, the battle against Covid-19 also involves fighting against stigma.
"The coronavirus is not a shameful disease," hammer authorities across the continent, where people suspected of having contracted it are singled out at work, in their neighborhood and even in their homes.
A month ago, Fatou, a Senegalese woman in her twenties who prefers not to give her real first name, had the bitter experience: after having been in contact with a patient, the young woman - who is immediately confined to her room - has been ostracized from her neighborhood.
"Messages have circulated on social networks, with my first name, my last name and my address," said the girl who does not even want us to write in which city of Senegal she lives. Then young people in the neighborhood started spreading lies, claiming that she "had contracted the virus by sleeping with white people," she said.
Fatou, who never left her room before being tested negative, then still had to spend two weeks in isolation in a hotel when she had no symptoms: the doctors who followed her had received "anonymous calls ", according to her. This at least allowed him to breathe, "far from the gossip".
5,000 km away, in Gabon, Jocelyn - again an assumed name - a biologist who tests suspected cases in Libreville, suffers "this discrimination every day".
- Stay hidden -
With his team, he tries to remain discreet when they go into the homes, even if it means putting themselves in danger. "We team up with our suits inside rather than on the porch," he says.
"The Gabonese are panicked at the idea of coming to their home", so we are trying to organize tests "elsewhere, in neutral places", he says.
Because the situation can quickly escalate. In the neighboring country, in Cameroon, the second person who tested positive was expelled by its owner, says Professor Yap Boum, epidemiologist in Yaoundé.
The stigma is not the prerogative of Africa and has been observed everywhere else, he nuances, adding: "But it is true that here, we live in community, we know our neighbors".
Some even prefer to remain hidden. "Several people died because they had delayed their care for fear of stigma," says the professor, also director of the Doctors Without Borders research center in Africa. "We must take into account the psychological aspect if we want to win this battle", maintains the researcher.
- Caregivers sidelined -
And especially for caregivers. "They are doubly stigmatized," explains Yap Boum. At work, where staff from other departments sometimes refuse to "speak to them or use the same toilet as them" and, at home, where they are sometimes "seen as plague victims".
Cameroonian nurses were left by their husbands, driven from their homes because they worked in coronavirus units, ensures the psychiatrist Laure Menguene Mviena, in charge of the psychological response to Covid-19 in Yaoundé.
"It is urgent to accompany them psychologically because, if they are exhausted mentally and physically, how are we going to do to treat others?", She worries.
But for that, we need to educate the population.
A difficult equation for the authorities who must, on the one hand, adopt a firm tone to enforce barrier gestures and, on the other, avoid the psychosis that generates stigma.
We must "communicate more" and remember "that the mortality rate remains low here, lower than in Europe", says the psychiatrist. Sub-Saharan Africa currently deplores only some 1,400 coronavirus deaths.
However, the anathema which strikes certain patients can continue them after the cure.
- Nicknamed Corona -
This is the case of Roselyn Nyambura, a Kenyan who, after leaving the hospital, continued "to be mocked and stared at" by her neighbors, she confides. Some even go as far as nicknamed "Corona".
It is necessary to make “testify the people recovered on television”, proposes professor Boum, or “to distribute to the cured documents certifying that they do not constitute“ no “more a danger” than the other citizens, “a little like after Ebola” .
No study has yet scientifically demonstrated that a cured patient is immune, even temporarily, from the coronavirus.
The Ebola epidemic, which hit West Africa very hard in 2014, showed authorities that the answer could not be only health.
In Nigeria, the authorities broadcast prevention spots insisting that the coronavirus was not synonymous with "death penalty", that "stigma was a bad thing".
However, the message is still sometimes difficult to get across. In Somalia, wearing a protective mask is not easy: Mohamed Sharif, a driver in Mogadishu, is forced to wear a muffler to work. But he noticed that people avoided him or even fled in his presence.
Some people think that "if you wear the mask, you must have the virus", he testified, admitting that he sometimes "takes it off to avoid this humiliation".
burx-cma / gir / stb / jhd
© 2020 AFP