(Kinshasa) The number of cholera cases “has increased worryingly” over the past ten days in the camps for displaced persons in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, alarms Doctors Without Borders in a press release published Thursday.
“Between November 26 and December 7, 256 patients were admitted” to a cholera treatment center run by the medical organization in Munigi, between Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu of more than a million inhabitants and, just on the northern edge of the city, the camps for displaced persons in Nyiragongo territory.
According to the United Nations humanitarian coordination, more than 177,000 people have found refuge there after fleeing the advance of the M23 rebellion in recent weeks.
While heavy downpours due to the rainy season fall daily on Goma, the displaced live crammed into huts made of branches and pieces of tarpaulin.
“We have no showers or toilets,” Nyira Safari, mother of an eight-year-old girl, hospitalized with symptoms of cholera, told MSF.
Like this family of displaced persons, tens of thousands of others have no access to sanitary facilities and live in deplorable hygienic conditions and very overcrowded conditions.
“All the ingredients are in place for a health disaster,” warns Simplice Ngar-One, MSF’s cholera response manager in Goma.
The organization calls for the mobilization of humanitarian actors and is indignant at a “crie lack of assistance” while the displaced are only a few kilometers from Goma, a humanitarian hub in eastern DRC.
The M23 (“March 23 Movement”) is a former predominantly Tutsi rebellion that took up arms again late last year and conquered large swathes of territory north of Goma.
According to Congolese authorities, UN experts and American diplomacy, the M23 is supported by Rwanda. But Kigali disputes, accusing in return Kinshasa of collusion with the FDLR, a Hutu movement formed by certain perpetrators of the Tutsi genocide in 1994 in Rwanda.