Uganda, Rwanda border on Congo : Is Ebola slowly spreading to East Africa?
By Prof. Dr. Wolfgang H. Thome
ETN Africa
Aug 25, 2014
Congo is sandwiched between East and West Africa – and is already facing challenges of near biblical proportions, from internal strife to crumbling and often entirely absent infrastructure, low literacy, corrupt regimes and often inexplicable hostility against Eastern neighbors Uganda and Rwanda has the country’s Equator Province now suffered a confirmed Ebola outbreak. An already overburdened health system in the affected areas is now at breaking point, as resource allocation for health centres and hospitals in the rural areas has always been notoriously low.
This may be threatening the travel and tourism industry as well. This industry is slow in Congo, but a major source of revenue in neighboring Uganda and Rwanda.
Fortunately the type of Ebola in Congo is of a different and a slightly less serious type to that in West African countries.
Though not related to the present situation in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the Congolese strain has been identified as being different pointing to a local outbreak – the country suffered seven previous Ebola outbreaks since the virus was discovered in 1976, the last one in 2012 – has this new hotspot brought the disease closer to East Africa’s frontiers as Congo DR shares land borders with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi as well as South Sudan, all of which will now probably see surveillance and screening stepped up similar to what airports already do.
The present Congo outbreak cost at least 13 lives, including doctors and nurses who did not immediately identify what their patients were suffering from and made worse by the shortage of often the most basic medical supplies in rural areas of Congo like surgical gloves, masks, needles and sterilization equipment. This has undoubtedly contributed to the spread of the disease as more than 70 people died with symptoms of hemorrhagic fever over the past weeks though not all were confirmed to have been infected by the Ebola virus.
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