“If you can’t feed your family, it’s pretty difficult to adhere to health protocols, which is so necessary now,” said David Stevenson, the World Food Programme’s Country Director for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His message to donors is that Ebola cannot be beaten in the east of the country on medicine alone.
Stevenson told UN News that Ebola is “a health crisis, there’s no question about that.” But the area is also tragically affected by conflict, food insecurity and displacement, so the response “needs to have a comprehensive approach.”
The numbers explain the urgency. The current outbreak was declared on 15 May and is caused by the rare Bundibugyo species. It is the fastest on record, with more than 5,500 cases and 2,642 deaths in its first 100 days alone. The DRC has fought Ebola 17 times since the virus was identified some 50 years ago, and WFP has been on the front lines of this one from the start.
Hunger in Ituri
Stevenson has visited Ituri province, the epicentre, and seen what years of fighting and displacement have done to families there. “It’s a place where there are over 500,000 people in IPC 4 of hunger and food insecurity,” he said. IPC is the five-phase scale humanitarians use to classify hunger. Phase 4, in his words, is “one notch short of mortality from starvation.”
In that setting, he argued, asking people to change how they live will not work if they cannot meet basic needs. With the epidemic moving faster than the response, food assistance has to become “part and parcel of the community approach.”
Getting to remote villages
Most people who catch Ebola never reach a treatment centre, Stevenson said, which is why WFP is helping to build more. The harder task is carrying food to the “very remote rural areas.” The roads are “terrible” and often impassable, yet “we always find a way to deliver,” he said.
He was blunt about the response from abroad. The DRC operation ranks among WFP’s top priorities, alongside Ukraine, the Gaza Strip, Sudan and South Sudan. “I’m stunned that we don’t have the response from the international community directly supporting the food assistance that’s needed so that collectively we can end Ebola,” he said. “We’re asking for support now.”
On a recent visit to a treatment centre he met a woman who “let out this amazing smile.” The head of the centre explained that she had been cured and was going home. Stevenson credited her recovery to the medical care and also to good nutrition and food support.
