The virus, which is highly contagious, has killed some 1,000 people since August 2018. Efforts to limit its spread have been trampled by armed conflict and fake news. The man shot dead by police was a member of the Mai-Mai armed rebel group, Sylvain Kanyamanda, the mayor of Butembo, a town in North Kivu province, told AFP. Mr Kanyamanda said that “security forces had prevented the attackers from crossing a 40-metre (130-foot) perimeter” around the health centre where Ebola patients were receiving treatment.
DR Congo’s North Kivu province is the epicentre of a fresh outbreak of the viral disease which has killed more than 1,000 people since last August out of around 1,600 infected, according to health officials.
Among these, 99 health workers have contacted the disease, and 34 have died. The Health Ministry, however, stressed on Sunday the despite a recent spike in Ebola deaths, a 42-day-old baby had been successfully cured of the killer virus.
Ebola spreads through contact with bodily fluids. It causes haemorrhagic fever with severe vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding.
But the Ebola response in the region is being hampered by violent and sometimes deadly attacks on medical teams tackling the highly contagious fever.
It is also being hindered by the presence of warring armed groups, including the Mai-Mai, and by locals convinced Ebola is fake and who refuse treatment and ignore life-saving prevention advice.
Essential measures to curb its spread include trust, communication, care of patients and their families, infection control, contact tracing, ring vaccination and safe burials.
Last week, the UN special representative to the DR Congo blasted rumours that the world body was trying to cash in on Ebola.
The head of the UN mission Leila Zerrougui dismissed as “sheer madness” local claims that “there is no illness, that they want to poison us because they are trying to cash in on us.”
“We are here to work with the authorities but we are also here to say to the people that it is really incredible that those who have come to care for you can be attacked,” Mrs Zerrougui said in comments reported by UN broadcaster Okapi radio.
On Monday, the World Health Organisation said that political instability in DR Congo had – in part – allowed Ebola to run amok.
WHO emergencies chief Mike Ryan said that there were “myriad” Mai-Mai militia groups in DR Congo, with at least 21 around the Ebola-hit towns of Butembo and Katwa alone, some leaning toward criminal activity and many being manipulated by political causes.
“There is a lot of political gaming going on in this part of the world – government and opposition and others – and this needs to stop,” he told an audience at Geneva’s Graduate Institute.
An “all society approach” is needed, Mr Ryan stressed, “or this situation will get even worse.”
The outbreak is the tenth and biggest in DR Congo since the disease was first recorded in the country, then known as Zaire, in 1976. It is also the second deadliest in history after the 2013-16 epidemic that killed 11,300 people in West Africa.