Médecins Sans Frontières - BACK FROM THE FIELD: Corinne Torre on Ebola outbreak in North Kivu, DRC (INT)

Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF245602

Date taken / Date Recorded 01/10/2018 12:00 AM

Country Democratic Republic of Congo

Commissioning section MSF-FRANCE

Photographer / videographer / producer Mohammad Ghannam

Copyright MSF

Usage Rights (MSF) Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available yes

Editor's rating ★★★★★ (C)

Video format h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 2m38s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 259.39 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist I’ve just got back after 3 weeks in North Kivu in Congo where there’s an outbreak of Ebola.

(ONSCREEN TEXT)
Cases of Ebola have been confirmed over 250 km from Mangina, the epicentre of the outbreak

Corinne Torre – emergency coordinator (in French)
I went to the treatment centre in Mangina several times where we now have less patients
but the epidemic is far from over. The epidemic is spreading.

Why is it spreading? Because of who we call contacts.
Contacts are potential patients who’ve been in proximity to patients who are now cured or, regrettably, have died.
This is why the epidemic has spread to Butembo near Lubero, and to the Ugandan border.

The biggest challenge is reaching out to these people, quite simply because they’re scared of the disease and the treatment centres which they see as places where people just go to die, and they’d rather die back home in their villages.

There have already been 161 cases of Ebola - suspected and confirmed - and 105 deaths.
The mortality rate is almost 70%

A single patient generated 25 contacts. She died in Mangina. She had a brother who was a nurse. He took off. He knew about the disease and refused to get treatment. And died in his village. He too generated contacts.
Because this is an emergency, we try to reach out to these contacts. We try to find them to convince them to come to the treatment centres. But they’re scared.

Contact tracing is challenging due to the security context

In addition to this complex situation there’s also the problem of fighting around Beni. To give you an example, we had a security incident… We were having a meal with the team and there was a huge bang, which caused a certain amount if panic.
Not particularly worried, we stepped outside of the hotel imagining it was just lightening because it was raining heavily. But it turned out to be a rocket that had landed 200m from the hotel.
It doesn’t happen every day, but still, recently people have been killed.
This context clearly prevents us from doing our work in the best conditions.

MSF teams have treated close to half of all Ebola patients and vaccinated almost 500 health workers in the region

END