The fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded is leaving thousands more people hungry in eastern Congo, a region engulfed in conflicts and a fight over precious minerals, the head of the UN food agency warned on Wednesday.
The World Food Program’s acting executive director, Carl Skau, told The Associated Press during a visit to the hard-hit Ituri province that the outbreak is a “crisis on top of a crisis” that has compounded a catastrophic situation with over five million Congolese already experiencing emergency-level food insecurity.
The long-running conflict in eastern Congo has driven nearly 10 million people into crisis or emergency levels of hunger, with Ituri – the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak – among the most affected with 1.9 million in need of food, according to the WFP.
“My number one message is that this situation requires much, much more attention,” Skau later told a video news conference with UN correspondents. “This is the fastest-growing Ebola crisis ever.”
Since the outbreak was declared on May 15, it took just over two months for 1,000 people to die of Ebola in eastern Congo, compared to the 2014-2016 outbreak in West Africa, which had been considered the worst in history, and it took about eight months to reach that number.
The dramatic surge shows the urgent need to scale up food, protective equipment, trained staff and funding, Skau said, stressing that the lack of money has forced WFP to cut the number of people it is assisting in Congo from 3 million last year to 1 million this year.
