The Red Cross voiced alarm Tuesday over the risk that fighting in the besieged DR Congo city of Goma could cause samples of Ebola and other pathogens held in a laboratory to escape.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is “very concerned about the situation in the laboratory of the national biomedical research institute, which is facing a risk of power cuts”, ICRC regional director for Africa Patrick Youssef said.
Speaking to reporters in Geneva, he stressed the importance of “preserving the samples that may be affected by the clashes”, warning of “unimaginable consequences if the (samples), including the Ebola virus, that it contains were to spread.”
Youssef highlighted that the laboratory was “very close” to the ICRC delegation in Goma but he had no information about the safety of other labs in the city.
The main city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has become a battleground since fighters from the Tutsi-led M23 armed group and Rwandan forces entered central Goma on Sunday after a weeks-long advance.
The mineral rich east of the vast central African country has been by plagued by fighting between armed groups, backed by regional rivals, since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Half a million people in the region have been forced from their homes since the start of the year, the UN refugee agency said on Monday.
Goma, a city of one million near the border with Rwanda, was already home to an estimated 700,000 internally displaced people.
ICRC voiced alarm at the impact of the surge in fighting on civilians, warning in a statement that it had seen a “massive influx of people wounded by gunshots and explosive ordnance into ICRC-supported facilities”, including Goma’s CBCA Ndosho hospital.
The organisation said that since the start of the month, its staff had treated more than 600 wounded — nearly half of them civilians and many of them women and children.
“The wounded are transported by motorbike, others by bus, or with the help of Congolese Red Cross volunteers,” Myriam Favier, head of the ICRC sub-delegation in Goma, said in the statement.
“Civilians are arriving seriously wounded by bullets or shrapnel,” she said, describing how some patients were “lying on the floor due to lack of space”.
Francois Moreillon, head of the ICRC’s DR Congo delegation, said the organisation was “receiving a large number of calls from people who are wounded, helpless and left to fend for themselves”.
