War in Congo’s east puts millions at risk of infectious disease

Fighting between Rwandan-backed rebels and the Congolese army has placed millions of people at high risk of death from the spread of disease, Africa’s chief health advisory body said.

The war, concentrated in Congo’s eastern city of Goma where 3 million people live and almost 1 million have been displaced, exponentially raises the risk of illnesses such as mpox, measles and cholera, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Guns cannot kill all of us, but outbreaks can,” Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya said in a briefing Thursday. “It’s not acceptable for us in Africa to still have this kind of open war.”

The fighting is complicating contact tracing, infection prevention and food access, all of which increase the risk of disease.

The World Food Programme has halted the distribution of basic nutrition in Goma as their staff’s safety has been put in danger and major access roads and the airport have been cut off.

“Food and water supplies are running very low,” Cynthia Jones, the WFP’s emergency coordinator in eastern Congo, said in an earlier briefing. “The next 24 hours are critical.”

The war is also straining the health system. “Hospital and medical services are overwhelmed by the number of injured individuals,” Jones said.

The conflict in eastern Congo has simmered since the mid-1990s in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. The current violence involves dozens of armed groups, fights over political and economic power, long-running ethnic tensions and troops from countries including Uganda, Burundi, South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi.

Outbreak concerns 

Among the groups that operate in eastern DRC are Hutu militias that have links to the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide — in which 800,000 mostly ethnic Tutsis died. They created an armed group known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, which is now allied with Congo’s army against the M23.

Kaseya’s tone was notably grave as he also talked about outbreaks in neighboring African countries including mpox in Burundi, Marburg in Tanzania and Ebola in Uganda.

“It’s time for us to take a strong decision as Africans and it’s time for us also to call upon our international partners to help Africans make this decision,” to stop fighting, Kaseya said, adding that as a health leader in Africa, his main concern is “an unexpected outbreak starting again from this region,” as it did with the new mpox variant last year.

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