00:00Just over 100 days since the Democratic Republic of Congo declared an Ebola outbreak,
00:06the crisis is now among the country's fastest growing and deadliest in recent years.
00:12More than 5,200 cases have been recorded so far, with nearly half resulting in death,
00:18as transmission continues to outpace efforts to contain the virus.
00:23Ludovic Levadu from Doctors Without Borders has just returned from the DRC.
00:29He tells us what he saw on the ground and what needs to happen now to get the outbreak under
00:35control.
00:36This crisis arrived within a crisis.
00:40It's already a region with decades of war, malnutrition, displaced people.
00:49The basic, the foundation of the health system is weak and collapsed.
00:55Now, there's even more people dying from other diseases than Ebola in the region, from malaria, cholera, measles.
01:06The access, it's quite a challenge.
01:10You have some roads, good roads, but it's really a few.
01:15The rainy season hits now, so access is a problem.
01:20The acceptance of the population, too.
01:23It's the 70th epidemic in this country, I think the 10th in this region.
01:34During the past, there have been mistrust with the authorities, the army.
01:40The army, the police have been used to force people to go to treatment centres.
01:45People have never seen back their relatives, so they fear to go there.
01:51So it's a lot of different layers to address before winning against Ebola.
02:00While the risk of Ebola spreading globally remains low, Ludovic says a coordinated response and more funding will be key
02:08to getting the outbreak under control.
02:10So on a larger scale worldwide, there's really, really minimal chance to have an epidemic really spreading.
02:20But after we are all connected and when we have a crisis somewhere, it's even for a commercial purpose,
02:32there's a lot of minerals, there's a lot of minerals for your phones and computers coming from this region.
02:40There's a lot of woods.
02:42So the crisis will impact everybody.
02:45And then it's a kind of, if we don't all address this issue together, we have seen so many of
02:54our NGO colleagues,
02:56other NGOs that don't have the funds to come, or they have some, but they can scale up, and the
03:06scale is required today.
03:09I hope that it won't be the biggest epidemic that we know since the last 20 years, 30 years.
03:21But today the response is not there, and the government, the funding is not there.
03:28And it's not only USAID, it's also the other ECO, other founders.
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