The fastest growing Ebola outbreak is worsening hunger in eastern Congo, a UN agency chief warns

BUNIA, Congo — The fastest growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded is leaving thousands more people hungry in eastern Congo, a region engulfed in conflicts and a fight over precious minerals, the head of the U.N. food agency warned on Wednesday.

The World Food Program's acting executive director, Carl Skau, told The Associated Press during a visit to the hard-hit Ituri province that the outbreak is a “crisis on top of a crisis” that has compounded a catastrophic situation with over 5 million Congolese already experiencing emergency-level food insecurity.

The long-running conflict in eastern Congo has driven nearly 10 million people into crisis or emergency levels of hunger, with Ituri — the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak — among the most affected with 1.9 million in need of food, according to the WFP.

“My number one message is that this situation requires much, much more attention,” Skau later told a video news conference with U.N. correspondents. “This is the fastest growing Ebola crisis ever.”

Ebola's impact is spiraling

Since the outbreak was declared on May 15, it took just over two months for 1,000 people to die of Ebola in eastern Congo, compared to the 2014-2016 outbreak in West Africa that had been considered the worst in history and when it took about eight months to reach that number.

The dramatic surge shows the urgent need to scale up food, protective equipment, trained staff and funding, Skau said, stressing that the lack of money has forced WFP to cut the number of people it is assisting in Congo from 3 million last year to 1 million this year.

U.N. senior Ebola coordinator Julien Harneis, who was with Skau on the visit to Ituri, said the $2.1 billion humanitarian appeal for Congo is only 45% funded.

The separate Ebola response appeal is being revised upward because it only covered two provinces and now there are four, he said.

The outbreak has been particularly difficult to fight because the Bundibugyo virus responsible for it has no approved vaccines or treatments, unlike most of Congo’s past outbreaks. Harneis said a vaccine trial is underway, but getting a vaccine to Congo is months away.

The United Nations is working with the government and community workers to build trust so that people with symptoms will seek treatment quickly, Harneis said. If they do, he added, “they have a very good chance of surviving Ebola.”

Ebola drives up malnutrition in affected communities

Across some 48 health zones affected with Ebola, WFP said more than 2.7 million people face acute food insecurity, including 628,000 in emergency conditions.

“Now with the Ebola crisis, this is getting worse. Markets are impacted, supply routes are impacted and so people are struggling even more to have enough to eat,” Skau told the AP, and malnutrition is rising.

Since it erupted, the ongoing Ebola outbreak has recorded 3,360 confirmed cases, including 1,487 deaths. Harneis said that in the last 24 hours, 50 people died of Ebola.

Measures introduced to slow the spread — including border closures and restriction of movements and large gatherings — have disrupted life and businesses, driving up food and fuel prices, the WFP has said. The agency said it has so far delivered more than 160,000 hot meals to patients, contacts and front line workers in 17 treatment and isolation centers.

In Mongbwalu, a mining town about 69 kilometers (43 miles) from Bunia, Ituri's provincial capital, residents said Ebola and the measures introduced to fight it have made it difficult for some families to feed their children.

Kahambu Deborah, a 40-year-old mother of six, said she had been struggling to access her farmland due to rebel violence, and that the restrictions linked to Ebola had made things more challenging.

“Sometimes, because of the insecurity, we can’t even go to our fields, and our children are suffering as a result,” she said.

Health workers seek to limit the movement of people

Dr. Richard Lokudu, director-general of the Mongbwalu General Hospital, said health workers are seeing more malnutrition cases in the region, compared to before the outbreak, “even at the Ebola treatment center.”

In Mongbwalu, the U.N. agency’s food support program has helped to “limit the movement of people seeking the means to survive,” said Tourne Kasereka, a monitoring assistant with the WFP.

A critical aspect of that response is getting food to those in need of it, according to Skau.

“The World Food Program needs resources (and) donors to step up so that we can do more, to alleviate the pressures on the people here in Ituri,” he said.

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Lederer reported from the United Nations. Associated Press writer Wilson McMakin in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.