IN A dank, unlit room in a government office in Mbandaka, a sleepy city of 1m people on the banks of the Congo river, Marie-Claire Thérèse Fwelo is booming out her most valuable knowledge to an assembled group of perhaps 80 health workers. “What do we look for?” she asks the class. They respond in unison: “a brutal fever”. And what else? “Someone who has been in contact with an Ebola patient?”, pipes up one.
This is the ninth outbreak of Ebola for Ms Fwelo, a 63-year-old Congolese employee of the World Health Organisation (WHO). As a young nurse she was at the hospital where the fever was first isolated in 1976. Since then she has become an expert on epidemic control. Yet this outbreak is the scariest Ms Fwelo has experienced in her own country. Most previous instances of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been in remote towns where the disease burns out fast. This time the virus has spread onto the country’s main artery, the Congo river. A little over 600km downstream is...Continue reading
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