Too many in Congo's Ebola outbreak are dying at home

Two-month-old Lahya Kathembo became an orphan in a day. Her mother succumbed to Ebola on a Saturday morning. By sunset her father was dead, too.

They had been sick for more than a week before health workers finally persuaded them to seek treatment, neighbours said.

They believed their illness was the work of people jealous about their newborn daughter, a community organizer said, and sought the guidance of a traditional spiritual healer.

The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo is ravaging Beni, a sprawling city of some 600,000, in large part because so many of the sick are choosing to stay at home. In doing so, they unknowingly infect caregivers and those who mourn them.

"People are waiting until the last minute to bring their family members and when they do it's complicated for us," says Mathieu Kanyama, head of health promotion at the Ebola treatment center in Beni run by the Alliance for International Medical Action, or ALIMA.

"Here there are doctors, not magicians."
Dr. Maurice Kakule, who became one of this outbreak's first Ebola patients after he treated a sick woman at his clinic, is now trying to make it easier for those who are ill
"Some have heard of the problem of Ebola but there have been no survivors in their family," he said. "Since they had relatives die at a treatment center, they think people are killed there and that's why they categorically refuse to go."
"I don't blame people for not finding this attractive, despite the fact that we have a clinical trial going on."