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BENI, Congo (AP) — The memories come flooding back whenever Vianney Kambale Kombi hears the word Ebola.He remembers the pain and fear in his community in the eastern Congo city of Beni during the 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak, history’s second-biggest with more than 3,400 reported cases and over 2,200 deaths. It was stopped with the aid of vaccines.Kombi also remembers the broad skepticism over the disease, attacks on health workers and inaction from patients that he blames for the speed in which the disease spread.“We thought it was witchcraft,” said Kombi. “The community had not accepted that this disease existed and it had not accepted that we could recover from it.”In Beni, a bustling commercial hub near the borders with Uganda and Rwanda, some fear that a repeat of mistakes made during Congo’s past outbreaks and the lack of an approved vaccine this time around might make the response to the latest outbreak more challenging.A total of 515 infections have been confirmed in the current outbreak caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, a type of Ebola virus, including 91 deaths and 12 recoveries.
Suspicions of a conspiracyKombi recalled how he contracted the virus after being exposed to others who had it. He said they had little information about the disease at the time, and that while many thought it was witchcraft, others described it as a “Western conspiracy for funding reasons.”“The community had not accepted that we could recover from this disease, that’s why reintegrating into the community at first was a bit difficult,” he said.“When a pandemic hits here in Congo, we initially think it’s a political issue,” said Bienfait Wanzire, who also recovered after contracting Ebola during the 2018 outbreak.“At first, we thought it was a spiritual illness,” he said. “Then because there were election campaigns, we believed it was political.”
