Mob Burns Congo Ebola Center Amid Rare Strain Outbreak
Several hundred people massed at the gates of a hospital to demand the body of a suspected Ebola victim. Violence broke out when staff refused the request.
The ruins of an isolation ward that caught fire during the chaos when a crowd demanded the body of a suspected Ebola victim in Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of Congo. Credit...
Flying in with United Nations peacekeepers, Declan Walsh and Arlette Bashizi reached the Congolese city at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.
Aid is desperately scarce here in Bunia, the epicenter of an alarming Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hospitals are swamped with patients infected with a rare species of the virus.
So medical staff at one hospital on the edge of the city were relieved when an international aid group erected an isolation ward in its garden, to treat the worst cases.
That respite turned to chaos on Thursday when a furious crowd stormed the hospital, hoping to retrieve the body of a suspected Ebola victim, and the isolation ward was burned to the ground.
