No new cases to report, but Radio Okapi says the local government is bracing for difficulties: North Kivu: civil society and the Ebola response support committee mobilize the population of Beni. Excerpt from the Google translation:
The provincial coordination of civil society in North Kivu invites the population not to give in to “rumors and poisoning”, in order to avoid a health disaster due to Ebola as was the case during the tenth epidemic in the area. For its part, the Ebola response support committee insists on the “community involvement” of the local population.
The vice-president of the provincial coordination of civil society, Edgard Mateso, asks the population of Beni to no longer put up resistance to the teams fighting against Ebola:
“We would like to appeal to the local community to abandon this strategy of resisting against the teams that come to help us. That the community beware of intox, bad information which is sometimes distilled by politicians, leaders or even by ill-intentioned people who, sometimes, confuse the population.
"We still remember the horrors of the tenth epidemic, we lost more than 2,700 people during this epidemic. We already have expertise that is up to the situation. If we capitalize on knowledge and experience, there is hope.”
From the Congolese government, Edgard Mateso calls for the mobilization of resources to stop the spread of this 13th Ebola epidemic in the DRC.
“On the government side, we believe that it is urgent to mobilize human resources, financial resources and material resources. But also we would have liked the government to have recourse to local expertise, because sometimes when we bring in people who do not master the habits and customs of the region, it creates resistance, ”he added.
