NPR84%
'It takes a lot of courage': DR Congo health workers battle Ebola 27%
By Emmet Livingstone0%
6/30/2026, 8:47:26 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Pessimism Bias as the most egregious example at 27.5% saturation with 197 hits. Analysis detected 1,174 faulty-reasoning hits from 716 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.1% and a BS Rank of 27% (16,177 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 73.90% of the article peer group.
BUNIA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Moise Bulabantu is consumed by stress at the thought of contracting Ebola.
As a community nurse in an Ebola-stricken area of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, he is at high risk of getting sick.
Ever since the government declared an outbreak on May 15, Bulabantu has been in daily contact with people suffering from the disease.
"We don't have protective equipment," says the 38-year-old, from his small clinic in a poor suburb of Bunia, the capital of Ituri province.
"We're extremely afraid."
Bulabantu is the only state health worker for an area of about 40,000 people — and one of many hundreds of frontline health personnel in Ituri risking their lives to fight Ebola with limited means.
Congo is among the five poorest nations in the world, according to the World Bank, and health infrastructure is severely degraded across most of the country.
Bulabantu's clinic consists of several rooms in a clapboard structure.
Foam mattresses on rickety beds have no sheets on them.
And there is one small entrance, with no way to isolate suspected Ebola cases who arrive seeking care or advice.
Cases keep coming in too.
Every day, Bulabantu receives around 15 alerts of people showing suspicious symptoms, such as fever or vomiting, which he must investigate.
Of those, usually two or three end up positive.
"We've really had a lot of cases," says Bulabantu, who has bags under his eyes.
Despite now receiving support from CARE, an international NGO, the nurse says that neither he nor his colleagues have anywhere near enough protective equipment.
Across Ituri, health workers have similar complaints about equipment shortages, although there are no precise figures.
The province is the epicenter of the outbreak, accounting for more than 91% of the confirmed cases, according to the Congolese health ministry.
As of June 30, the authorities have registered over 1,307 confirmed infections and 377 deaths.
As well as being poor, Ituri has also been plagued by brutal armed groups for decades, which is complicating the health response.
Difficulties operating in the province partly explain why there are equipment shortages, even after the United Nations and aid groups have flown in hundreds of tons of supplies.
Logistics are also complicated because the virus has also spread so widely: It's present in 22 out of 36 of the province's health zones.
Ebola has also spread to the Congolese provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu.
Uganda, which shares a long and porous border with Ituri, has registered 19 cases.
Another factor behind shortages is the disposability of some protective personal equipment — such as medical gloves — which means there needs to be a steady supply.
Several aid workers, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, also said that coordinating with Congolese authorities is challenging.
Lack of protection is causing deaths among health workers, however.
According to the World Health Organization, 17 health workers have died since the beginning of the outbreak, out of 75 who have caught the disease.
Shannon Hamilton, team lead in Ituri for evangelical aid organization Samaritan's Purse, explained that close family members of Ebola patients and health workers were among the most likely people to get infected because the disease is spread through touch.
"That's what makes this disease so terrible," she said.
"Those who care for the sick become the next to have Ebola, so it can just really spread like wildfire."
In Nyankunde hospital, in a rural area about 20 miles southeast of Bunia, doctors explained that the problem was particularly acute at the start of the outbreak, but that even though things have improved, they still don't have enough PPE.
"It's not a rosy situation," says Désiré Duabu, the head doctor of the Nyankunde health zone, who said the whole hospital needed to be decontaminated in order to work safely.
Patients going to the hospital for complaints unrelated to Ebola also risked contracting the disease there, because of difficulties the hospital had isolating suspect cases.
Eight medical staff in total got Ebola at the hospital alone, according to Duabu.
One person, a medical student, died of the disease.
"It takes a lot of courage to care for the sick," he says.
"But of course, we do it."
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