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This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus concentrates on a map of a long-forsaken war zone in the northeastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Ebola is gaining ground here, and Tedros, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), needs to stop it. He huddles in a dim corner of a mess hall with his officers on the front lines. Their fingers dance across the map as they point to areas occupied by militia, and explain how their teams struggle to circulate through these parts with vaccines and thermometers, key tools for limiting Ebola’s transmission.
As darkness falls, more WHO staff file into the hall at the United Nations compound in Butembo, a volatile city in North Kivu province. The din of their conversations rises as a buffet of stewed meat, fried fish and plantains gets cold and some boxed wine grows warm. Eventually, Tedros, as he prefers to be called, ends the meeting with his top aides and announces that it’s time to eat.
He settles into a chair at a table of young Ebola responders — mainly Congolese public-health specialists and physicians — and falls silent. It was June, and Tedros was facing pressure from all directions. The outbreak had already grown to be the second largest in history. And despite having a new Ebola vaccine and drugs to treat the disease, the death rate was soaring at 67% because the therapies weren’t reaching everyone in need. Armed groups weren’t the WHO’s only challenge. Many residents just didn’t accept that Ebola responders were there to help. A deep-seated scepticism of outsiders comes from more than a century of conflict, exploitation and political corruption in the region. And wars over the past 25 years have destroyed any semblance of a reliable, regulated health system. “The outbreak of Ebola is a symptom,” Tedros explains. “The root cause is political instability.”
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