Via mediacongo.net: Difficult follow-up of people in contact with Ebola patients. The Google translation:
How can it be ensured that people who have been in contact with Ebola patients also develop symptoms that may in turn contaminate others? This is known as the follow-up of contact cases and is the headache facing the authorities in their fight against the spread of the Ebola epidemic affecting eastern DRC. Currently, of the more than 2,300 contacts identified, three-quarters are actually followed, from an official source.
Follow-up of contacts is the nerve of the war against the Ebola virus. A difficult war in North Kivu, commercial crossroads where the population to live and sometimes survive is accustomed to move, as explained Dr. Bathé Ndjoloko, coordinator of the response to the epidemic.
"The high human density and greater mobility of populations" are "peculiarities" that the authorities have not had to face in other provinces. As a result, they can not always "get their hands on everyone". Especially since "people are always in their fields. Often, they go for a day or two. And we do not always have the means to retain them for daily monitoring. The official says, however, that "efforts have been made so that with the partners we can find a snack to stabilize them as quickly as possible, with food rations".
To these difficulties is added insecurity, which makes some localities inaccessible, but also the panic that drives more than one to desert. Louise Kahambou Tsongo, deputy district chief in Mangina, the epicenter of the epidemic, says that "some are afraid. When they see people die, the neighbor goes to the hospital, "they move. Others have already left "in the forest, in the province of Ituri".
And even if the leaders ask the inhabitants not to leave, "so as not to spread the disease almost everywhere", the latter "refuse to listen". The Ministry of Health is now using the authority of traditional chiefs to try to find and reason with these families.
