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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroff. This is The Daily. At the front lines of the Ebola crisis in Central Africa, badly equipped health workers with little outside support are losing the fight against one of the worst outbreaks in history. Today, my colleague Declan Walsh takes us to the epicenter of the virus to understand why, so far, its spread has been nearly impossible to stop.
It's Wednesday, June 3rd. Declan, thank you so much for doing this. Where are you right now?
I'm in Bunya, a city in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Okay. So you've been in the DRC for about a week and a half covering this horrific Ebola outbreak. So just tell us what you're seeing, what it's been like on the ground.
It's a really dire situation here right now. This outbreak was only detected just over two weeks ago, but the virus was probably spreading for two, some groups are saying even three months before it was detected. And so we just don't know how deep, how wide it has gotten into the population in these areas.
And that's really hampered efforts, not just to treat the people affected by the disease, but to contain its spread.
And in terms of numbers, cases, deaths, where do things stand?
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Chapter 2: What are the current challenges faced by health workers in the Ebola outbreak?
And what did you find?
Well, first, the road to get there was quite difficult. It was really a road just to name. It was made of mud. It was extremely rough and bumpy. But all along that road, we passed these Congolese military checkpoints. And that was because we were passing through territory where at least three or four different militias were known to operate.
So that was complicating the response and also preventing aid workers from getting to this town. And when we got to Mongbolo itself, we went straight to the public hospital, which we knew was the center of treatment efforts. We were expecting really to see the architecture of an Ebola response that you classically think of.
For some of us, it's maybe a Hollywood reference, like movies like Outbreak and so on, these large white tents, lots of people walking around in sealed suits. Right.
Chapter 3: Why is the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa so difficult to contain?
But there was almost nothing. And we went into the actual Ebola wards themselves. We put on the full protective equipment. We spoke to the staff. We found a doctor who wanted to take us inside. And there, honestly, it was pretty shocking. Apart from the doctor who brought me in, the ward was just full of people who had come to help the Ebola patients.
Usually relatives who had come to bring food or water because those things aren't provided by the hospital, but they were wearing almost no protective equipment. And at the end of the room in the corner, we found this young boy, five-year-old boy called Emmanuel, who was lying on this bare mattress on his own, hooked up to a very simple drip.
And his dad was standing over him, looking so concerned. And we got speaking in French. He told me that his son had been going to school just a few days earlier when the teacher sent him home. Apparently, he had a headache and a fever. The family tried to look after him for the first few days, but he got worse.
And then he said that the night before, Emmanuel started to bleed uncontrollably out of his nose. And so they rushed him to this hospital. And when he was lying there, he had this tissue stuffed up his nose to try and staunch that bleeding.
And what was even more striking was that just a couple of yards away, two beds down, there was lying the body of a 21-year-old woman called Christine Barhati, who had died just hours earlier. The doctor said that she had been doing fine in the evening and then suddenly, at about two in the morning, she fell into a coma. and died very quickly. He said they were unable to revive her.
Her shoes were still under the bed where she had left them. Her belongings were in a bag. But what was so disturbing about that is that the body of a person who has just died of Ebola is extremely contagious.
And yet the remains of this poor woman were just covered by this thin sheet and people were walking in and out of this ward with very little protection, including, it has to be said, the dad of this boy. This just seemed to go against every precaution that you could take against Ebola.
And did you get a sense of why this was happening? Did you talk to the doctors? What was going on? I'm sure they didn't want that to be happening either.
No, the doctors were very well aware of the risks.
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Chapter 4: What factors contributed to the delayed detection of the outbreak?
They're going to the hospital too late to get treatment. By the time they get there, many of them are dying. And so people in a certain way logically are starting to associate the hospital as a place where people go not to have their lives saved, but to die. And so I think that really is partly at the root of some of these wild conspiracy theories that were going around.
But what that meant in practice for the medical staff at the hospital is that they not only were grappling with this incredibly dangerous disease and chronically under equipped to fight it, but they were also dealing with this intense hostility from the community.
And what did that hostility actually look like? How did it play out? How did you see it?
Chapter 5: How did the outbreak begin in Mongboalu and what was the response?
So when we got to Mongboalu, the huge issue was how to deal with the body of this popular pastor who had just died the night before. His name was Sylvester Atama. He was this charismatic Catholic preacher in the town who had a pretty big following.
And when we arrived at the hospital, the director told us that his followers had gathered at the gate of the hospital and they were demanding to get his body so that they could bury it in the traditional Congolese fashion. Now, the hospital director refused because he said that would have been a disaster for the spread of the disease in the town.
Why?
Because traditional burial practices in the Congo involve large numbers of mourners touching the body of a deceased person.
Oh, no.
And so a funeral can become a super spreader event. And that, in fact, has been a problem in previous outbreaks. Okay, makes sense. But the refusal to give up this body by the director enraged his supporters. Right. who didn't believe his explanations about why this was an incredibly unsafe thing to do.
And so the day before, they had stormed into the hospital compound, and the director told me he had been chased through the compound with people throwing rocks at him. And in fact, parked outside his office, I could see his vehicle, which had a hole in one of the windows where he said people threw rocks that didn't hit him, but they hit his car.
They're literally attacking the hospital director.
They are literally attacking him in order to get this body. They refused. And then he said that the security forces were called to try and bring peace. Then we turn up the next day. Then that evening, we went back to our hotel in the town. And just as we were settling in after dark, we hear these gunshots going off.
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