Mobile gold miners hamper Ebola fight

[AP Photo]

Isaac Batisa is only 11, but he spends his days digging for gold at a mine in eastern Congo, hoping to earn enough to help support his family.

He is among hundreds of people, many of them children, working at the artisanal site in Ituri province, the center of the country’s fast-moving Ebola outbreak.

For Batisa, the concern is not the disease, which has killed more than 2,300 people among nearly 5,000 cases. He simply wants to return home with some money, sometimes earning as little as $2 a day.

“We don’t know about Ebola here,” he said.

A workforce constantly moving

As the virus spreads at a historic pace, miners who move through remote and insecure territory have become a major concern for teams trying to monitor infections.

The Associated Press gained rare access to one of Ituri’s largest mines, in Iga-Barrière. No Ebola cases have been confirmed at Congo’s mining sites, but officials say the true situation in isolated areas is difficult to determine.

Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids or contaminated objects and surfaces. Precautions such as handwashing and social distancing are largely absent at artisanal mines, where people work closely together using basic tools. Many sites operate illegally, prompting miners to avoid authorities.

The current outbreak is caused by the less common Bundibugyo virus. That has complicated the response because no specific vaccine or treatment is available.

Artisanal gold mining in Ituri attracts a highly mobile workforce. Miners travel between villages looking for deposits and jobs, while traders move between mining areas and population centers to sell gold.

That movement complicates efforts to locate infected people and identify anyone they may have exposed, said Mari Ndika, an Ebola response worker.

“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 contact with two miners who had been identified as possible Ebola contacts after they moved to another site, according to community worker Anna Ndroy Kansime.

“They left for a destination that, to this day, remains unknown,” Kansime said.

The danger is acute because authorities are already struggling to keep pace. Someone may become infected in one place and travel elsewhere before monitoring teams learn of the exposure, potentially establishing new transmission chains that are difficult to trace.

There is no reliable system for registering miners or tracking their movements, Kansime said.

Gold offers aprecarious lifeline

Eastern Congo’s minerals—including gold, coltan, tin and tungsten—have fueled decades of conflict while also providing income for residents with few alternatives.

Batisa said his parents and two brothers were killed by Congolese rebels. He now lives with his aunt and five siblings and said she encouraged him to work at the mine.

More than 100 armed groups operate in eastern Congo, including the Islamic State-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces and the CODECO militia. Fighting has displaced large populations and intensified the poverty that pushes families toward mining.

About 2 million people work in artisanal and small-scale mining across Congo. No reliable estimate shows how many are children.

UNICEF estimates that 15% of Congolese children ages 5 to 17 perform child labor.

In conflict-ravaged Ituri, where employment is scarce, mining offers cash despite the danger.

At Iga-Barrière, miners descend through shafts extending dozens of meters underground. Tunnels are dug mostly by hand, often with little reinforcement. Above ground, others search open pits for traces of gold.

Children labor alongside adults. Pregnant women are also found in the pits, sometimes late in their pregnancies, Kansime said.

Miner Singoma Aimé, 36, said workers lack adequate protection. “We especially need hand-washing facilities because everyone comes from home to work at the site,” he said.

The outbreak across six eastern provinces is already the fastest-growing in history and could become the deadliest if fatalities surpass the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic, which killed more than 11,000 people.

Nearly 5,000 infections and 2,325 deaths have been recorded in Congo, with Ituri accounting for almost 90% of cases. Experts believe the virus was circulating in the mining town of Mongbwalu as early as February, months before authorities declared the outbreak on May 15.

Mercy Corps warned that cases had appeared along a major travel route about 35 kilometers from the South Sudan border, raising concern about the virus’s “widening footprint.”

Its speed remains “extremely concerning” and continues to outpace efforts to track and contain it, said Trish Newport, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF.

“We see family members that come in who have had 15 people in their family die,” Newport said. “We rapidly need to scale up to prevent more deaths, more families and communities from being impacted.”

Ndika said the response must include teaching miners about prevention and working with authorities, mine managers and communities to identify suspected infections.

Yet impassable roads, armed groups and people displaced by violence continue to obstruct health workers. Slowing miners’ movement is equally difficult, Kansime said.

“For many families, gold is what pays for food,” she added. CONSTANT SAME BAGALWA & MARK BANCHEREAU, IGA-BARRIÈRE, MDT/AP