Health workers go on strike without pay as Ebola contact tracing efforts in Congo are delayed

On Friday, as every day, community health worker and head of contact tracing in Nizi, Gideon Banga Ngbabi, and his team fanned out across communities in eastern Congo looking for people who may have crossed the paths of the country’s fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history.

Gideon Banga Ngbabi said the challenge they face now is that health workers have not received their salaries for more than three months.

“We are also facing challenges related to the limited mobility of our field staff,” he added.

On Thursday, health workers at the Nizi Treatment Center went on strike and the facility was temporarily closed.

Workers are investigating dozens of alerts, looking for people who have been exposed to suspected or confirmed cases, and trying to get anyone with symptoms into care before the virus spreads further.

But the surveillance system is increasingly failing to keep up with the virus.

If monitoring does not work well, the entire response will suffer, Ngbabi said.

Government data published on Tuesday night showed that the number of confirmed cases reached 4,381, including 2,011 deaths. Starting with the first confirmed case, the number of deaths reached about three times faster than in the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014-2016, the worst on record.

The current outbreak was declared on May 15, but health authorities now say sequencing shows it began months earlier, in February.

In Nizi, Ngbabi’s monitoring teams said they receive an average of 60 to 70 alerts a day.

Anna Ndroi Ghasemi, a community health worker in Nizi, said she visits homes to educate residents about Ebola and reports suspected cases to health officials. But she said workers like her lack basic protective supplies.

The current outbreak, caused by the rare Bundibugyo Ebola virus, has been unfolding in some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

There were no approved vaccines or treatments for Bundibugyo virus, although trials were ongoing.

Unpaid strikes by some health workers, threats by rebel groups, anger from long-traumatized communities, and misinformation asserting that Ebola is not real have all significantly hampered the response.