On 1 June 2020, a new Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak was declared in Équateur province, western Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the country’s eleventh recorded epidemic.

Declared while DRC was still grappling with the tenth Ebola epidemic in the country’s northeast, and amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, this new Ebola outbreak has already spread to 11 health zones in the province, in a very hard-to-reach region where some villages are only accessible by river.

MSF deployed teams to the health zones of Bolomba, Bikoro, Monieka, Ingende and Lotombe in order to curb the spread of the disease, support community surveillance and provide rapid treatment to patients living in hard-to-reach areas.

As the epidemic is moving with people by land and river, to remote areas, in a province where infrastructure is scarce and villages far from each other, MSF is setting up a decentralised response and deploys its teams in the most remote, affected health areas, with small structures easily accessible to the communities. As of 1 September, 2020, MSF teams are supporting nine treatment and isolation centres in five health zones to provide care as close as possible to the active hotspots of the disease.

Little information is circulating on Ebola in the province, and the epidemic is affecting some health zones for the first time ever. That’s why our health promotion teams are supporting those of the Ministry of Health to strengthen awareness and community-based surveillance.

This community-based approach allows communities to detect suspected cases and quickly escalate alerts. It leads to an ownership of the response to the epidemic by the communities themselves.