Ebola is ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo and has killed more than 4,000 people in the country, most of them in Ituri Province. I have worked in humanitarian health for decades and helped lead responses to other large Ebola outbreaks, but I had never seen one get this far ahead of us. The virus arrived at a particularly dangerous moment: Congo’s health systems are weakened by steep cuts in foreign aid and regional conflict that has displaced nearly seven million people countrywide. In clinics in Ituri, these funding cuts have meant going without the surveillance tools needed to flag Ebola symptoms early, allowing the virus to spread before health officials can catch up. Twenty countries and international partners have pledged $2.9 billion for the response. That funding needs to reach the front lines quickly to ramp up prevention efforts and keep clinics open. But to stop this outbreak, we also need to build trust. On a recent visit to Bunia, the capital of Ituri, which is the epicenter of the outbreak, I saw that this trust is broken. As I describe in a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, people are hiding their symptoms instead of coming forward, and the virus just keeps moving. My colleagues at the International Rescue Committee working on community outreach in Bunia told me about a woman who didn’t take her children to a clinic when they had fever, because she believed the Ebola response was a moneymaking scheme. If a woman is too frightened to bring her sick child to a clinic or a family believes that seeking treatment means surrendering a loved one to die alone, the virus will keep finding places to hide. I don’t blame this mother. Few outreach workers have gone door to door to explain the actions that health officials are taking to prevent Ebola’s spread or sat down to answer questions with local leaders, whom people trust. That work costs money, and funding is arriving neither fast enough nor at the necessary scale. We know the medical tools required to fight Ebola, but those tools can be effective only if we can reach the people who need them.
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