Health workers battling the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo are hindered by lack of data, budget cuts and a fearful community.
Transcript
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
When Ebola began spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year, aid workers were already warning that the response was struggling to keep up.
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HEATHER KERR: We had a lot more funding for the last outbreak. And we really need funding – you know, whether it comes from big donors, members of the public – to be in this race against time, which is what I would call it.
SUMMERS: That’s Heather Kerr, the country director for the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She spoke to NPR back in May. Now, the outbreak has become the largest and deadliest in Congo’s history. More than 9,000 cases have been confirmed, and more than 4,000 people have died. In a new essay for The New York Times, Kerr writes that she’s worked in Congo for decades, and she’s never seen an Ebola crisis skip this far ahead of the response. She’s in the capital, Kinshasa, and joins us now. Welcome back to the program.
KERR: Thank you.
SUMMERS: So, Heather, when you spoke to us back in May, you described a race against time. Tell us what the status of things are now.
KERR: Well, I still feel we’re in a race against time. I mean, in the outbreak in 2018, at this moment, there were only 609 cases and 370 deaths, just to give you some idea of just how big this outbreak is.
SUMMERS: Heather, what is different about this outbreak? Why is it spreading so fast?
KERR: We simply haven’t caught up with it. And so many of the deaths are in the community. So contact tracing is done when there’s a new Ebola case, but those contact cases are only around between sort of 30 and 50%. So people are frightened. People are frightened to go to Ebola treatment centers. People are frightened to go to health centers where they might go normally, where they’d normally take their children, because they’re scared of Ebola. They’re scared ’cause they don’t know enough about it. They’re scared because they say they don’t want to die alone in a treatment center, so they’d rather stay at home and die there than go to a center to be treated. So, so many people aren’t getting treated, and so many people are dying in the community. And we just don’t have all that data…
SUMMERS: Yeah.
KERR: …To know what’s really going on.
SUMMERS: When people choose to not go to those treatment centers, as you’ve described, when they stay away, how does that impact efforts to contain the virus?
KERR: Well, seriously, because if they won’t come to the center, we don’t really – we don’t know the scale of things. And it means that people are dying in the community. They’re not being buried safely. So as you know, safe burials in Ebola are really important because that’s one of the most dangerous times to catch Ebola, when you’re doing burials. But if people die in the community, they’re burying their loved ones as they would do normally, and that includes a lot of touching of the body and carrying out various rituals. So that definitely isn’t helping either.
SUMMERS: What are healthcare workers doing to build trust to encourage people to come to those treatment centers rather than to stay home?
KERR: Well, we’re trying to work on that particular angle ’cause the trust is what’s missing. So what needs doing – and everybody needs to work on this – is to talk to trusted community leaders like religious leaders, youth leaders, women leaders, the guys who ride the mototaxis ’cause there’s so many of them, and they talk to people all the time. But we need them to be passing on the messages in their own way, not in the way that we suggest, but for people in the community to be persuading the community to go to the health centers. And the same thing goes for the health workers in their community. They need to be passing on those messages, and that’s the only way we’ll get trust.
SUMMERS: What will happen if it doesn’t turn around, if there’s not more resources to be able to help contain this outbreak?
KERR: What we need is vaccines. In the last outbreak, the 2018 outbreak here, we got the vaccine during the outbreak, and that made a difference. People who were health workers, frontline health workers, contacts, contacts of contacts, my own staff, they all got vaccinated. And I think if we could get a vaccine and a treatment, that would make a huge difference.
SUMMERS: We’ve been speaking with Heather Kerr, the country director for the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Heather, thanks so much.
KERR: Thank you.
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