Julien Harneis (UN Senior Ebola Coordinator) and Carl Skau (WFP) on the Ebola response on the ground - Press Conference

With that, I will now turn to our guests who I believe are on the line from Bunia.
Oh, there they are.
As you can see, we have Julien Harneis, the UN Senior Ebola coordinator, and next to him, Carl Skau, the acting Executive Director of the World Food Program.
Mr.
Harneis, I think we'll start with you and then turn to Mr.
Skau.
Thank you and good afternoon.
In the last 24 hours, 15.
Have died of ad in Congo and the number of cases is growing exponentially, doubling every 20 days.
This is a far faster growth than the growth in our response.
And so the gap between the epidemic and our response is widening.
Of course, I've also seen some extraordinary work.
I've met people in the community like Grace and Christine cooking WFP supplies for patients in the center next to their homes.
I've seen Red Cross volunteers in burial teams, nurses and doctors, Congolese from the African continent and from around the world.
I've seen the leadership of the Prime Minister of the Minister of Health, Roger Campbell and the incident manager, Professor Steven Hooker.
However, the virus is pitious and what we did yesterday does not mean that we are winning on the virus.
All the good we have done is not yet enough.
So in support of the government, I'm calling that we step up across the response, the United Nations and governmental organizations, member states.
We need to massively step up our response, be it in terms of supplies, specialized supplies like personal protective equipment, staff, specialized medical staff, and logisticians.
And we call upon member states to keep the borders open so that our staff can travel in to Congo to respond so that we can bring in supplies quickly and freely, and then when colleagues come out, they're able to return home.
The epidemic is worsening an already difficult humanitarian situation in eastern DRC.
We see a worsening of the food security situation, the availability of medical services being degraded by the epidemic and across the board, the challenges are greater.
I'm particularly privileged to be here with my friend Karl, leader of the World Food Program, and I'm particularly grateful to the World Fruit Program for their work.
The planes, their helicopters, their logistics keep us moving.
They're providing hot meals for patients and food rations for people across Eastern DRC.
We could not do this without them.
Thank you.
Thank you, Julian, and let me begin by also recognizing your leadership for which we are deeply grateful, but also really paying tribute and expressing my gratitude for all the workers in this health and humanitarian response who are literally running towards the fighting to try to contain this crisis.
Spent a full day here in Bunia visiting treatment centers, speaking treatment centers where also WFP is delivering food to health workers, to patients, but also to relatives of those who have been isolated.
I've had a chance to speak to the authorities, to UN partners, to other NGO partners, and also to the affected population.
My number one message is that this situation requires much, much more attention.
I welcome this opportunity to speak to all of you.
This is the fastest growing Ebola crisis Ebola outbreak ever.
To make a comparison, in the past two months, 1,000 people have died.
That took eight months for 1,000 people to die in West Africa.
That means that there is a four fold in terms of the number of death in this short period of time.
I think that itself requires world attention.
Like rien said, when it comes to the response to Ebola, we really need to scale up.
We need to step up.
I think all the strategies, all the lessons are here, all the elements are here in terms of the strategy, but it needs to be done four or five times more and it needs to be done urgently.
The second is that we need an all rounded response.
You may think that it's just about treating the identified patients.
But no, this requires from all the experience, we have a broader set of tools and that includes food, we cannot isolate patients unless we provide them also food.
We cannot have health workers working around the clock in these dangerous environments unless they're also being fed.
Frankly, we also have whole communities who have been closed off and that we expect to remain in their homes and they also need to be fed.
WFP has served some 160,000 hot meals so far and we continue to deliver on that.
We have delivered food parcels to some 20,000 affected families who have been closed off.
I think that's an important message here that food is essential in this response.
You cannot force people to choose between hunger and health.
But I've also had the chance to sit down and speak to people about their broader sets of concerns, if you will.
What really strikes me colleagues, is that people here are exhausted.
They are exhausted from years of conflict, from repeated displacement, from crisis after crisis after crisis that has been hitting them.
I think to understand this exhaustion, it's important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
Let me just point to four layers, if you will.
The first one being the conflict and the displacement.
7 million people have been displaced in the eastern DRC and 2 million of those in this province of Ituri.
It's not happened to them once.
I mean, since 2019, most of the people that I have spoken to have had to move four or five times and been completely uprooted every time.
When they have fled, they have been looted, they have no safety, they have no proper shelter.
They have no land of their own where they can grow the simplest food.
And so what we see also is that many children are drifting around, are turning to child labor, including in these terrible informal mining industry that we all know about.
That's the first set, if you will, of pressure on the people.
The second is really around hunger.
Some 10 million people.
I mean, 10 million people, that's the population of Sweden, the country I come from, are acutely food insecure in the eastern DRC and 3 million of those are in IPC four.
As you know, emergency level of food insecurity, that is one step away from famine.
That means they go to bed every night hungry, they wake up hungry every morning.
In the past, the only way for people to survive was to be in camps because those camps were serviced by NGOs and by WFB for food.
But we are dramatically cutting that food.
We have gone from a year ago assisting some 3 million people here to now assist around 1 million people.
What you see are desperate people turning out from those camps, trying to find ways to survive, including selling the little belongings they have left or turning to very small scale farming, putting some beans in the ground on a plot of land that they don't and they don't know if they will be able to harvest.
That is really the overall dramatic food insecurity situation we have.
I mean, the health, I'm not a health expert, but I think it's important also to say that this place lacks any kind of basic health care.
I heard today that some 1,000 health care centers has been closed down in the past couple of years because of lack of funding.
That's in a situation where some 400,000 children are malnourished and of course, cholera has also been spreading over the past few months.
Then on top of that, of course, if I had a fourth layer is now this Ebola crisis, the fastest growing Ebola outbreak ever on record.
Clearly, like Julianne said, we need all hands on deck, and we really need an approach that centers around communities, around the people.
We need a scale up of the Ebola response, three, four, five times of what we are doing now.
We need, like I said, an all rounded response that also brings in other key components such as food.
We need to also at the same time, attend to these broader challenges.
People need peace.
When you speak to them, I was just at an all staff meeting, we have a couple of hundred staff here and I asked them about the atmosphere, what they want and everyone returned to the message.
We need peace, we need security.
Our friends need a piece of land so that they can just find a place to stable, live, to begin rebuilding their lives.
They want to send their kids to school.
For all of this, we need funding.
I mean, the funding that is coming here is far from enough and we need political attention.
I really thank you listening to us today and I count on you to try to bring this message to the world.
Thank you.
Thanks very much to both of you.
I'll now open the floor up for questions and please, as you ask, let us know to whom you're directing the question.
Edi.
Thank you both very much on behalf of the United Nations Correspondent Association for doing this briefing.
My name is Edith Lettera from the Associated Press.
A couple of follow up questions.
First, how much money do you need for what period of time? Secondly, I recall from the last Ebola outbreak that two of the biggest problems were families trying to hide members who had Ebola, which was one difficulty in trying to trace and stop the outbreak.
Secondly, the funeral practices in the DRC which require close contact with the deceased.
Are those still two of the main issues you're facing and what else is causing this spiraling outbreak? Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Edith.
The first question is on the funding.
We look at the HNRP, the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan.
The current plan is 2.1 billion and is only 45% funded.
So in addition to that, there are all the requirements of the Ebola response, which are currently being revised because when the plan was done two months ago, we only covered two provinces, but now that it is now it's spread into both Chopo and Otule we need to significantly increase both the amount covered the geography, but also because of the expected duration of the response, and that will be done in the next two weeks.
Now on the deaths or rather on the spread of the epidemic, we're facing Indeed, the points you're raising about community trust are absolutely vital.
About 60% of the deaths are occurring in the recorded in the community.
And that is worrying because when you have a death in the community, that means that the The the viral charge is the highest at the moment just after death.
That means that you've had people in the community who have been cared for by the daughter or the wife or the mother.
As a result, many of the persons most affected are young women.
You get the transmission within the community.
Many children under five are dying because of Ebola and those 60% of deaths in the community, we want them to be seeking care because if people come into care, quickly upon when we see the symptoms, they come into care, they have a very good chance of surviving Ebola.
Then furthermore, we're working to bring in therapeutics and post exposition prophylaxis.
So there are ways to work on Ebola and for people to survive, but only if they come in quickly.
That is getting that community trust so that people feel the trust to come in, seek care will save lives.
There's a huge challenge where we're working with the government and community workers to engage with the community to resolve that.
Thank you.
I mean, I will just be quick.
I don't know really what the overall GPS is for DRC.
What I do know is $76 million is our ask to provide logistics that Julian spoke about, the warehousing, the last mile delivery, the air services, but also the food for this Ebola response.
$75 million is the ask and that's frankly just peanuts, if you look at the bigger scheme of things.
What has been interesting so far is that our logistics has been somewhat funded, but the food element here has been zero funded for us.
I think that speaks to this issue of understanding that if you want to be effective, you need to have an all rounded response.
It's not only the health response that is needed to be able to contain that.
I think again, speaking to the urgency here, it's clear that at the pace that this is now spreading, it has been contained quite locally here for the moment, but there are clear risks, of course, for this epidemic to spread also beyond borders.
Could I ask a quick follow up? We've heard that there are some early vaccine trials.
Are any of those have you seen any trials taking place or any indication of early results.
Indeed, there has a trial that has been commenced with a volunteer in the United Kingdom, we're many months away from seeing an effective vaccine.
The Bundibugo strain of vabola is not one for which there is a vaccine is available, nor are the therapeutics yet available.
We're doing trials, but currently trials are being conducted for therapeutics and for post exposition prophylaxis.
We're closer with the therapeutics, but it's many months away before we have vaccines.
But the even be without that.
Survive it.
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If you could just repeat the last few things you said because your mic went out for a second.
Yes.
I was saying that there's transfer therapeutics going on for post exposure prophylaxis and vaccines.
The vaccines are several months away before we see the ability to deploy them in Democratic Republic of Congo.
But the important thing is even without that, if you seek care quickly, the quality of care is sufficient to significantly increases your chances of surviving the Ebola virus disease.
If people come in late, that's where we see the high case fatality rate.
Thank you.
Okay.
Thanks.
Dulce.
Hi, this is Dulcie Lamarck from Past Blue.
I have a couple of questions.
One for Carl.
The WFP is asking for 75 million.
Is the relevant State Department office run by Jeremy Lewin? Are they mulling over, releasing some funds? And regarding the political attention, DRC is the president of the Security Council this month but the word Ebola has not come up in the council this month.
I'm just wondering, is there a gap between what's happening in Kinshasa and what's happening in Eastern DRC? Well, I guess that's it.
When you say it's contained, it's contained in the DRC and has not spread to neighboring countries? Is that what you're saying? Thanks.
I'll cover the Abby.
In terms of the Security Council, I mean, obviously, the ELA response is a public health matter.
It does occur within the context of armed groups and violence.
But what is the vast majority of the cases are here in and around Bunia and we are in a secure environment here.
And people can seek care without concerns.
What we're looking at is a public health response in a complicated environment.
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Can you please can you please repeat? I think we have you now.
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I was trying to put the question.
And the last case I had hes very happy and e.
And obviously, that doesn't mean that grabs the woods and strong border and much travel back to be careful.
Who the green areas and and we need to be getting competitiveness mess we are doing meal emergency fund and South Sudan, Iran Bruni and Central African rep.
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Yeah.
We can hear you.
Justly to say we haven't received funding from the US State Department.
We are in discussions for further contributions, including through the a a follow up because to say it's a global health crisis belies what happened with the other Ebola crisis when the US and Samantha power in the Security Council led a mobilization effort to control the ebolic spread.
I guess I don't understand why you would separate out a global health crisis from Security Council acting, especially when you're saying that political attention is needed.
Well, thank you and thank you for coming.
I think that would be a question to the Democratic here.
Are there any further questions? If not, I would like once more to thank our guests, Julian Harness and Carl Scout.
Thanks very much and good luck on your work in the days ahead.
Thanks.
Thank you.