Congo’s Desperate Gold Miners: ‘We Don’t Know About Ebola’

Isaac Batisa is only a child, but he spends his days digging for gold at a mining site in eastern Congo, hoping to earn enough money to support his family. The 11-year-old is among hundreds of people, many of them children, working at the artisanal gold mine in eastern Congo’s Ituri province, where the country’s fast-moving Ebola outbreak is concentrated. For Isaac, though, his immediate concern isn’t the disease that has killed more than 2,300 people among over 5,000 cases so far, per the AP: The boy just wants to return home with some earnings, sometimes as little as $2 a day. “We don’t know about Ebola here,” he said.

As the outbreak spreads and kills people faster than any other outbreak of the disease in history, a major source of concern for monitoring efforts is miners constantly on the move and in hard-to-reach, unsafe territories. Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or through contaminated objects and surfaces. However, measures to limit the spread, such as regular hand-washing and social distancing, aren’t followed at the artisanal mining sites, where work to extract gold is done by workers using basic hand tools like shovels and pans. Many of the mines are illegal, with miners making efforts to evade local authorities.

In parts of the east, including Ituri, artisanal gold mining draws a highly mobile workforce as miners travel across villages in search of gold and related work, while small-scale traders travel between mining areas and population centers to trade the mineral. But that constant movement is also making Ebola harder to contain, complicating efforts to find infected people and trace those who may have been exposed, said Mari Ndika, an Ebola response worker. “Artisanal miners may come into contact with several communities as they move from one place to another, [which] can facilitate the transmission of the virus,” she said.

About 2 million people work in artisanal and small-scale mining across Congo, per a 2024 report. There’s no reliable recent estimate of how many are kids like Batisa; UNICEF estimates 15% of children ages 5 to 17 in Congo take part in child labor. In Ituri province, where conflict has uprooted families and where jobs are scarce, the mines offer the possibility of cash, however dangerous the work. The outbreak’s widening footprint and speed remain “extremely concerning” as it continues to outpace efforts to track and slow it. “We rapidly need to scale up to be able to prevent more deaths from happening, more families and communities from being impacted,” said Trish Newport of Doctors Without Borders. More here.