Mourners gathered in eastern Congo on Friday to bury a six-month-old girl, the third child from a local orphanage to succumb to Ebola this week, as authorities continue to grapple with the latest deadly outbreak.
People carried a cross as masked and gloved health workers carefully lowered Vanisa Anifa’s small coffin into the ground. A Catholic priest offered prayers over the infant’s body.
Father Innocent Ndogo said: “It’s a feeling of sadness because we have lost one of our own, a daughter of the church.”
He added: “As we have always said, the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.”
The Ituri region, the epicentre of the current epidemic, accounts for over 90 per cent of reported cases.
Efforts to contain the virus have been severely hampered by clashes between residents and healthcare professionals, often sparked by disrupted burial customs and a response that has, at times, become militarised.
The stark reality of the epidemic and the necessity of safe burial protocols were evident at Vanisa’s funeral on Friday, with only health workers in full protective gear permitted to handle the coffin and conduct the burial.
Bundibugyo, the type of Ebola in this outbreak, has no approved treatment or vaccine. Even health workers have said they don’t have the masks, gloves and other gear to protect themselves.
With 894 confirmed cases and more than 200 deaths so far, the current outbreak is three times worse than a previous outbreak in Uganda in 2000 and risks 35,000 suspected potential contacts, Africa’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.
However, it is still not nearly as deadly as a 2014 outbreak that killed more than 11,000.
The Bundibugyo strain was not tested for in the early days. This lack of testing is one of the reasons the outbreak has spread to such an extent. The more common Zaire virus, for which there is a vaccine, was responsible for most of Congo’s past 16 outbreaks of the disease.
Alex Lock, a communications officer at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, asked people to resist feeling indifferent.
“She was a baby. She had her whole life ahead of her. Unfortunately, she was taken by the disease, a disease that, as you know, is transmitted from one person to another,” he said.
Although the outbreak is concentrated in Ituri, cases have also been recorded in the North Kivu and South Kivu provinces and have spread across the border to Uganda, where 19 confirmed cases have been reported and two people have died.
