{"id":606922,"date":"2026-08-28T05:38:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T05:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/606922\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T05:38:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T05:38:10","slug":"behind-every-case-a-person-the-man-leading-drcs-ebola-fight-on-the-human-cost-hidden-behind-the-numbers-global-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/606922\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Behind every case, a person\u2019: the man leading DRC\u2019s Ebola fight on the human cost hidden behind the numbers | Global development"},"content":{"rendered":"

The statistics, says the man responsible for overseeing the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo<\/a> (DRC), are meaningless. That it is now the largest outbreak, the most deadly strain, that 100 days have passed, that the death rates keep climbing, says Prof Pierre Akilimali, should never detract from the human tragedies at the centre of this virus.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is behind those numbers that matters; it is the father, the child, the loved relative. Behind every case is a person and behind every person is a family. For us Congolese, we hold on to that as we work.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Akilimali, of the DRC\u2019s National Public Health Institute, and now the incident manager of the country\u2019s multi-agency response, is certain that those numbers will keep on sharply rising. As of 24 August, the Bundibugyo variant of the virus had 5,656 confirmed cases and 2,715 deaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s say in two months we will reach the peak and start seeing a decrease, but this is guesswork,\u201d he says. \u201cThe honest thing is that we do not yet know.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I can say is that as we are improving community engagement we expect to have more confirmed cases, so we need to be sure that treatment centres are able to cope with those increased numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prof Pierre Akilimali, who heads the National Public Health Institute in the DRC<\/p>\n

Akilimali, like most Congolese health workers involved in the Ebola<\/a> response since the outbreak was first officially declared in May, has been working flat out. He speaks to the Guardian on a rare day off, his first in months, but has to delay the interview several times to take urgent, work-related calls. \u201cRest is not an easy thing for the Ebola workers to find,\u201d the doctor says.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of my colleagues have been away from their own families for long periods; I do not dwell on it in the daily work, but I would not be honest if I said it was not heavy, to watch the human cost mount, case by case, and to know that behind each number is a family.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat carries me and the team is the simple knowledge that every contact followed, every family supported, is a life where the worst was avoided.\u201d<\/p>\n

Concern has been high particularly over the risk of the virus crossing borders \u2013 Uganda has just been declared free of Ebola<\/a> after several cases emerged there \u2013 but efforts seem to have contained the spread.<\/p>\n

Health workers queuing for a hot meal, distributed by the World Food Programme (WFP) at Mongbwalu general hospital, DRC, in June. Photograph: Michel Lunanga\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

That brings little comfort, however, for the people of eastern DRC, a region exhausted by years of war, neglect, resource-stripping and underdevelopment, where this is the 17th outbreak since Ebola was first identified in 1976.<\/p>\n

As the virus is transmitted from animals to people, Ebola usually begins in remote areas where people and wildlife live closer together and where health authorities have few outposts.<\/p>\n

People here, where militias and bandits keep nerves frayed, are suspicious and distrustful. There have been attacks on clinics, and on healthcare and burial workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d put it this way,\u201d says Akilimali. \u201cThe DRC has lived through repeated outbreaks, and communities have lived through a great deal \u2013 periods when the response did not always arrive, of confusing information, and the fear that comes with a disease that is frightening and carries a high toll.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be wrong of us to be surprised that some people hesitated at the start \u2013 that is not ignorance; in most cases it is the understandable fruit of hard experience, including experience of institutions letting them down.\u201d<\/p>\n

But things have been changing. \u201cWe have seen openness and cooperation grow. But mistrust does not disappear overnight, and we cannot count it out. Complacency about community mistrust is more dangerous than the mistrust itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is something profound in that the response that respects communities is the response which lasts,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe response belongs first to our own institutions \u2013 the Ministry of Public Health and the Institut National de Recherche Biom\u00e9dicale \u2013 and my work sits firmly inside that national framework, which is important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Workers with Unnicef\u2019s U-Report group raise awareness about Ebola transmission at Alanine market, Goma, DRC. Photograph: Daniel Buuma\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

However, he adds: \u201cWe need solidarity. This outbreak will cost a lot of the DRC government. So we need support from the regional and international community.\u201d Teams on the ground also face a struggle in convincing people that it is still safe to visit clinics and doctors for other conditions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn outbreak response that destroys the rest of the health system is a response that has failed, and we intend not to do that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Even bringing in cash for workers\u2019 wages has been problematic and led to people going unpaid for long periods.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is making us a little uncomfortable is when foreign organisations say \u2018oh, we are bringing all this money but this money is not reaching the ground\u2019 \u2013 it\u2019s not true when people say this. Their money is not managed by local government or regional centres, it is managed by the NGOs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe community hears them saying they are collecting all this money, and think we are managing this huge amount, but it\u2019s not true.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThis can influence the community reaction and our work in the field. It was one of the reasons they were destroying the health centres; they were saying you are earning money from each death, you are killing people to push up numbers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of speculation around mortality rates among children under five, but older people are also very vulnerable, and I\u2019m not interested in discussing speculation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn regard to the demographic, the most affected groups depend on the activities of people because it is spread from person to person. In one province, where there is a lot of mining exploitation, we will see more men falling ill; in other areas, more women because they are taking care of households and family.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis outbreak is serious \u2026 and we are not pretending otherwise. It is concentrated in a number of health zones in the east of the country, and we are seeing a case fatality rate that reminds us how dangerous this disease is.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I would also say, honestly, that the situation today is not the situation at the start,\u201d he adds. \u201cConfidence in the laboratory has improved, our teams have access to areas that were harder to reach and the national institutions have confirmed their stewardship of the response.<\/p>\n

A worker at a lab in the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, DRC, in July. Photograph: Arsene Mpiana\/Reuters<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in the middle of a serious outbreak, being fought by people who have done this before and learned from it \u2013 that is the most honest framing I can give.\u201d<\/p>\n

The things that matter most at this moment, he says, are finding every case and every contact of that case; keeping people safe and offering dignified burials; infection control in treatment centres; and building trust.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur community engagement is not a soft afterthought \u2013 it is as urgent as vaccine or any other technical pillar.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur approach is simple in principle, harder in practice: we do not lecture; we meet people where they are. We work through local health workers, community leaders, religious leaders and survivors themselves, because evidence shows that the voices people trust most are close to them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe explain what we are doing, we correct misinformation quickly and calmly when it appears, and we are prepared to change how we work when communities tell us what does not fit them. And we treat dignity and safety \u2013 including how families bury their loved ones \u2013 as frontline response, not an afterthought.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest challenge is the scale and speed of the outbreak against a geography and a cost of reaching everyone. Our teams work in rugged and remote areas, sometimes over difficult distances, and the coordination load \u2013 lots of partners, moving parts, cross-border aspects \u2013 is enormous. Every case that is found late tells us there is at least one chain we have not yet seen, and that is with us every day.<\/p>\n

Relatives of Vanisa Anifa, a six-month-old orphaned girl who died of Ebola, attend her burial, in Bunia in June. Photograph: Moses Sawasawa\/AP<\/p>\n

\u201cOne moment I come back to is a mother I met who brought her child to a treatment centre after others in the neighbourhood had been brought in too late to survive. She did it against a current of fear. It took real courage,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat she could decide to step through that door and trust us with the life of her child says everything about what the work is: we are not only fighting a virus, we are building enough trust that people will cross their own fear to reach help.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother is the relief on a family\u2019s face when the dignified burial of their loved one was possible,\u201d he says. \u201cAfter much anxiety, the knowledge that their child would be laid to rest with respect.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat stays with me more than any figure is that these families have lived through repeated outbreaks and great loss and yet, every day, they choose to trust us. That resolve remains with me more than any statistic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The statistics, says the man responsible for overseeing the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":["post-606922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}