DRC Ebola Crisis: Bodies Stacked as IS Threat Looms in Rainforest Hotspots

POLICY WIRE — Biakato, Democratic Republic of Congo — The scale of death in this besieged Congolese town has reached such proportions that bodies are stacked vertically on makeshift racks inside a shed near the hospital entrance.

Local burial grounds have reached capacity, forcing families to dig fresh graves in tight crevices between palm trees along the roadside.

With severe shortages of medicine, intravenous drips, and basic protective gear, three-quarters of Ebola patients in this region have succumbed to the disease.

Half a year into the crisis, the virus continues to carve a deadly path through the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

When first identified in May, the outbreak resembled a single, massive fire, with cases concentrated in a few towns within a single province.

Since then, the epidemic has transformed into a much larger and harder-to-track adversary, spreading across eight provinces and splitting into multiple hot spots as it moves through one of the world’s major rainforests.

Rather than one large blaze, numerous fires now burn across a vast area roughly the size of Britain.

Medical teams have contained the virus where it initially emerged, but infection rates are climbing sharply in other regions.

Biakato, a small town deep within the rainforest, suddenly accounted for as many as one-quarter of all new national cases.

Residents in this struggling community were left largely to fend for themselves, with dangerously limited resources to defend against the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history.

“We see the same mistakes as before,” said Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, who helped discover Ebola in 1976 and now leads Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research. “It’s as if we were starting from zero. It’s very disappointing.”

The containment campaign now faces a terrifying new complication: the presence of the Islamic State.

Reporting by Policy-Wire (PW)