Good morning. President Trump is backing away from his plan for a $1.8 billion fund to pay people he says have been victimized by the federal government. Opposition to the plan was staunch. And there are primary elections in six states today. (We’ll be keeping a close eye on California for many reasons.) We’re going to start, though, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where my colleague Declan Walsh is reporting on a terrible outbreak of the Ebola virus. Declan spoke this week with Katrin Bennhold, host of our newsletter “The World.”
Inside the epidemicThe Ebola virus has stalked Congo since at least the mid-1970s, when a major outbreak on the banks of the Ebola River gave the disease its name. The latest eruption, which the Congolese Health Ministry announced on May 15, has already become the third largest on record. It’s a particularly dangerous strain of Ebola this time, with no cure and no vaccine. Declan, our chief Africa correspondent, recently visited an Ebola ward in Ituri Province, the epicenter of the epidemic, where underequipped health workers have been trying to treat multiple patients with little outside support. Katrin spoke to him about what he saw. Katrin: Where exactly are you, and what is it like? Declan: I’m in Bunia, the capital of Ituri Province in Congo, and have been reporting in Mongbwalu, a town 50 miles north of here, where the outbreak is believed to have started. Driving there told us quite a lot about the outbreak. There were soldiers and checkpoints all along the way, a product of the long history of ethnic violence in this area. It’s also a gold-mining area with thousands of migrant workers from other parts of Congo. All of that makes this an ideal launchpad for a virus. How are locals coping?
The doctors and health workers do heroic work. But they’re completely swamped. The Ebola ward in Mongbwalu was disturbingly unsecured: people wandering in and out, nobody wearing much protection. It was lacking in all forms of equipment, medicine, basic supplies. And it had almost no testing kits, which are crucial to reducing the spread of the disease. How bad is this outbreak compared with past ones? It’s already the third-largest outbreak — and it’s still early days. Congo has had many Ebola outbreaks, but a few factors make this one different. One is that it is being caused by a different species. The main Ebola virus is known as the Zaire virus, and there are now several vaccines for it. But this virus — the Bundibugyo virus — has no approved vaccine or treatment yet. The mortality rate can be as high as 50 percent. This outbreak was also discovered late. There was an enormous lag between the apparent start, possibly as early as March, and the first identified case on May 15. We wrote last week that this outbreak was bad but unlikely to spread across the world. Does that remain true? Yes, according to experts. It’s an extremely serious outbreak here. It has spread into at least two other Congolese provinces, into neighboring Uganda and potentially into South Sudan. But, for now, it has been largely contained within this region. That’s no consolation, of course, to the people who live here and are really struggling. Fighting this outbreak is not just a matter of money and medicine. It’s also about combating perceptions and customs that are inadvertently helping the virus to spread. Conspiracy theories have been circulating that health workers and foreign nongovernmental organizations somehow conspired to either bring this virus to the area or use it to kill the population. I cannot tell you the number of conspiracy theories we’ve heard. But aren’t people used to Ebola outbreaks by now? Well, this is a town that escaped the last outbreak, so locals don’t have a common memory of dealing with Ebola. From their perspective, there was this wave of mysterious deaths all through April into early May until Ebola was finally declared. When people get sick here, they often go first to a traditional healer. That means that by the time they go to the hospital, the illness is at an advanced stage, and they often die within days. People have come to associate the hospital with death, not survival. They see loved ones going in to be treated and then they see coffins coming out. On top of that, one of the main vectors for transmission has been funerals. People here tend to embrace the dead as they say goodbye. But the body of an Ebola victim is extremely contagious, and so traditional funerals effectively become superspreader events. How do you stop that from happening?
You have to educate people and convince communities that it’s in their interest to ensure they bury their loved ones in a safe manner. What really struck me was that even in this chaotic, dangerous, difficult situation, local volunteers were throwing themselves into the line of fire. These are people who only a week ago were farmers and gold miners and traders. They signed up as volunteers with the Red Cross. They undertook some very hasty training. They were given protective equipment. And since then, they’ve been going into these communities, helping to disinfect bodies and to persuade people to engage in safe burials. It’s incredibly inspiring. More on the outbreak
For days, people close to Trump say, the president has been leaning toward scrapping his plan to establish a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claim to have been victims of unfair government prosecution. The retreat went public yesterday. The Justice Department announced it would abide by a federal judge’s temporary order not to activate the fund — at least until June 12, when a hearing is scheduled. Critics of the plan, including prominent Republicans, have characterized it as a scheme to lavish the president’s friends with public money. And some administration officials privately expressed relief that the judge’s ruling gave them a way out of what they saw as a self-inflicted mess. Still, Republicans last night were skeptical that the president would actually abandon the fund.
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