SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ebola is surging fast in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, with more than 900 confirmed cases and 245 deaths just over a month since the outbreak was declared. Health officials say that it is overwhelming the already fragile systems in Ituri Province, the epicenter of the current outbreak. Emmet Livingstone has been reporting for NPR in the region. Emmet, thanks so much for being with us.
EMMET LIVINGSTONE: Thank you.
SIMON: You've spent a week in Ituri, in the area that's at the heart of the Ebola outbreak. How bad is it?
LIVINGSTONE: Yeah. To put it bluntly, the situation is dire. For lots of people, life is still continuing as before, but because it has to. Children are going to school. People are going to church on Sundays and so on. But there's also a growing sense of fear. Ebola is spreading across a huge and difficult-to-access area. It's also spreading in Bunia, a city of over 1 million people. And there is a massive international response underway, but this outbreak was caught very late.
In the hospitals I visited, there was a constant arrival of suspected Ebola patients. And in many cases, because of poor health infrastructure, there's no way to isolate these cases, so they risk infecting others. People are also dying every day. Health personnel also say they don't have enough PPE. Doctors explained to me that lots of PPE, like masks or gloves, is single-use, so there needs to be a constant supply. And because the disease has spread so widely, nurses in rural areas are coming into daily contact with suspected Ebola patients, too, and for the most part, they have nothing.
SIMON: You, of course, have been inside Ebola treatment centers and hospitals. How are the healthcare workers coping?
LIVINGSTONE: I saw a difference between doctors working in Ebola treatment centers and other health personnel. Only a handful of these treatment centers are operating at the moment, and they've been set up specifically for Ebola patients. The doctors working there are often world specialists. But then there's the other health personnel, the community nurses or doctors working in small clinics. They're not trained for this, and yet they're highly exposed. Dozens of health workers have already been infected, and some, unfortunately, have already died.
SIMON: And, of course, as you said, the number of cases is quickly rising. Are healthcare workers able to keep up doing contact tracing, isolating people who are infected?
LIVINGSTONE: Yeah. It's actually hard to know for sure because so much of this outbreak is happening out of view. The government says 72% of contacts are being traced, but aid workers are very skeptical of this figure. Some told me off the record that it's probably around 40%.
What this means in simple terms is that the outbreak is out of control. And, of course, that means there's a risk of regional spread. Many people are not turning up to hospitals or health centers and are dying unnoticed. Health responders just don't know where all the cases are. So, for example, it emerged this week that there have been dozens of suspicious deaths in a displacement camp in Bunia. This camp is right next to the city's airport and the headquarters of NGOs. If it's confirmed to be Ebola, it's spreading right under the nose of the official response.
And then isolating suspected patients is also a huge problem. There's no system of triage in many hospitals or clinics, so suspected Ebola patients can be clumped together with others. To give you a concrete example, I visited a hospital 40 kilometers outside of Bunia where there was only one block of toilets for patients. So if you had Ebola or, say, appendicitis, you had to use the same facilities.
SIMON: Emmet, you've seen so much these past few days. I wonder if there's an image or a moment that stays with you in particular.
LIVINGSTONE: Yes. There is. I mean, amid all of this complexity and darkness, there were moments of joy. And in particular, in Mongbwalu, a gold-mining town at the heart of the outbreak, I happened to be in the hospital when two patients were released. One was a woman who was a member of staff at the hospital who had been infected. Another was a 3-year-old girl. They both looked a little bit dazed, but the adult woman was smiling and clutching the little girl's hand.
UNIDENTIFIED STAFF MEMBERS: (Singing in non-English language).
LIVINGSTONE: Hospital staff sang and danced, celebrating these patients who had survived the disease. It was a beautiful moment.
UNIDENTIFIED STAFF MEMBER: (Ululating).
UNIDENTIFIED STAFF MEMBERS: (Singing in non-English language).
SIMON: Well, thank you so much. Emmet Livingstone in Kinshasa.
LIVINGSTONE: Thank you.
SIMON: And you can hear more of Emmet's coverage from the Ebola epicenter on NPR next week, including a report from the mining town that's at the heart of the outbreak. That's Monday on All Things Considered. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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