Fear grips residents of Ugandan town over Ebola outbreak

On a hot afternoon in a hospital in the town of Bundibugyo, health workers were being trained to fight Ebola.

This particular day, they were astounded when dozens of patients suddenly scattered, some fearfully leaping over the benches and hedges to safety.

Medics soon learned that the people were scared by the body bag being used in a demonstration about how to handle the body of a real victim of the virus.

The bag was being pushed on a trolley through the corridors by trainees clad in full protective gear for the rigorous exercise being staged in the health centre near the border to Congo.

“They run because they saw something in the body bag that they thought was a dead body from Ebola. We are faced with a heavy stigma associated with Ebola here,” says Ejoku Emmanuel, who heads the Ebola surveillance program in the area.

Health staff and volunteers are being readied for the Ebola response in the Bundibugyo General hospital where four health workers out of five who died in the 2007 Ebola outbreak were buried.

Ebola is back in Uganda and Congo, and the World Health Organization (WHO) says by May 27, there were 223 deaths and 906 suspected cases in the current outbreak. Uganda identified nine cases and one death.

The current strain of the swift and deadly disease, known as the Bundibugyo Virus Disease, was named after this town situated on the floor of the East African Rift Valley.

The settlement is separated from the rest of Uganda by a spur of the Rwenzori range, also known as the Mountains of the Moon.

Touching the horizon across the border, heading down the slopes towards Bundibugyo, you see the misty Blue Mountains in Congo’s Ituri province.

This is now the epicentre of the world’s biggest Ebola epidemic, after one in West Africa that killed over 11,000 people by June 2016.

People in this small dusty town are not only worried about the spread of Ebola from Congo, but also scared of a repeat of the 2007 outbreak of the disease that killed 36 people and affected 176.

Survivors of the 2007 Bundibugyo epidemic recall with bitterness what they went through, fearing it may recur on a worse scale.

One of them is 60-year-old Isaac Bisunga Kiiza who contracted Ebola when he was working as a nurse in Bundibugyo’s Kikyo health centre, then the epicentre of the epidemic.

“We suddenly saw people falling sick and dying. We didn’t know what killed people because one family lost 6 members. The WHO and CDC came in and they was identified it as Ebola,” Bisunga told dpa.

“I was the first health worker to get infected with Ebola. There was no working gear, no gloves and the like. I handled the patients with my bare hands from the wards to the lab. I started feeling a high fever and general body weakness,” he says.

Bisunga, a father of eight, still works as a clinical nurse at the Bundibugyo general hospital. He complains of the after-effects of the Ebola infection and is worried about a repeat of the epidemic.

“Since I recovered, I have been suffering from various after effects. For instance, I have problems with vision, general body weakness and have piercing chest pains. If this disease hits again, it will be a disaster if authorities don’t move in with more vigour,” he said.

The government has introduced public awareness programmes, deploying vans moving around the streets with loudspeakers warning people not to shake hands, hold large gatherings and to avoid unnecessary functions like weddings.

In an extreme measure, the government has closed all border crossings with Congo “and anyone moving to and from Congo will be on his or her own. Whoever enters from here from Congo will be isolated and retained immediately,” says Bundibugyo district commissioner, Edward Mugabirwe.

People are advised to report cases with Ebola symptoms. But the public has been gripped by fear. A young man recently suspected of having Ebola was pulled out of a bus and nearly lynched.

“They threw him out of the bus and surrounded him. I received a call and went there immediately with policemen and we rescued him and got him into isolation,” says Ejoku, one of the Ugandans who was involved in fighting the West African Ebola epidemic.

Dozens of health workers led by Ejoku have been deployed in the area to respond rapidly to any calls made to a hotline for concerns about Ebola.

“These days, we are living in fear because when Ebola hit this area, it killed many people including doctors and health workers. Now that we hear it’s back, it may kill more,” says Elivania Masika, 38, who runs a shop.

Bundibugyo, 380 kilometres west of Uganda’s capital Kampala, is also some three hours drive across the border to Beni, a Congolese city also badly affected by Ebola.

At a border crossing in Bundibugyo district, from where a dirt road stretches up to Beni, residents fear both Ebola and being penniless after the border closure. They depend on that border for a living.

“My tomatoes are already rotting because I can’t sell them to the DRC anymore now. We are going to starve,” says Gevina Mbambu, 35, a trader at Busunga.

The borderline demarcated by the river Lamia cuts across people with the same ethnicity. They are not only engaged in trade but also regularly visit each other and participate in community functions like weddings, funerals and parties.

Children from both sides of the border play and swim together in the river. All these activities have now been suspended.

Businessman Saddam Kusemerwa told dpa, “I love money but with this Ebola outbreak, I can’t move near someone coming from Congo now. No. This disease kills people after they go through terrible pains.”

An Ebola emergency meeting in Kampala on May 23 attended by ministers from Congo, Uganda, South Sudan plus UN officials, called for more than $300 million for urgent intervention in the Ebola outbreak.

Uganda has had several outbreaks of Ebola including the most severe one in 2000 that killed 224 people out of 425 cases mostly in the northern region.

More action is needed this time round, and fast, in order to save people’s lives.