Eleven-year-old Isaac Batisa searches for gold at a mining site in eastern Congo to help feed his family
IGA-BARRIÈRE, Congo — Isaac Batisa spends his days digging for gold at a mining site in eastern Congo, hoping to earn enough money to support his family.
He is among hundreds of people, many of them children, working at the artisanal gold mine in eastern Congo's Ituri province, where the country's fast-moving Ebola outbreak is concentrated.
For the 11-year-old Batisa, though, his immediate concern is not the disease which has killed more than 2,300 people among at least 5,000 cases. He just wants to return home with some earnings, sometimes as little as $2 a day.
As the outbreak spreads and kills people faster than any other outbreak of the disease in history, a major source of concern for monitoring efforts is miners constantly on the move and in hard-to-reach, unsafe territories.
The Associated Press gained rare access into one of Ituri's largest mines, in the locality of Iga-Barrière, where miners crowd into pits to dig for gold. Although there are no known reports of the outbreak reaching any of Congo's mining sites, officials say it's difficult to know the true situation in hard-to-reach areas. Most new cases and deaths are reported among groups not being monitored, they say.
Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or through contaminated objects and surfaces. However, measures in place to limit the spread, such as regular handwashing and social distancing, are not followed at the artisanal mining sites, where work to extract gold is done by workers using basic hand tools like shovels and pans. Many of the mines are illegal, with miners making efforts to evade local authorities.
The Bundibugyo virus causing the current outbreak in Congo is less common than others that cause Ebola disease, which is complicating the response, because there are no specific treatments or vaccines.
In parts of the east, including Ituri, artisanal gold mining draws a highly mobile workforce as miners travel across villages in search of gold and related work while small-scale traders travel between mining areas and population centers to trade the mineral.
But that constant movement is also making Ebola harder to contain, complicating efforts to find infected people and trace those who may have been exposed, said Mari Ndika, an Ebola response worker involved in disease monitoring.
“Artisanal miners may come into contact with several communities as they move from one place to another (which) can facilitate the transmission of the virus if a person is infected,” she said.
Health workers recently lost track of two miners who had been identified as Ebola contacts after they moved to another mining site, according to Anna Ndroy Kansime, a community worker who helps educate people about the disease.
“They left for a destination that, to this day, remains unknown,” said Kansime.
The danger is particularly acute because health authorities are already struggling to keep up with the virus. People can become infected in one place and travel elsewhere before monitoring teams know they have been exposed, potentially creating new chains of transmission that are difficult to trace.
Complicating the effort, there is no reliable system for registering mine workers and tracking their movements, Kansime said.