Mobile Gold Miners in Eastern Congo Complicate Efforts to Contain Ebola Outbreak

Isaac Batisa is 11 years old, and he spends his days digging for gold at a mine in Iga-Barrière, in eastern Congo's Ituri province. On a good day he takes home some earnings; on others, as little as $2. Ituri is the center of the country's Ebola outbreak, which has now killed more than 2,300 people among over 5,000 cases. Asked about it, Isaac said simply: "We don't know about Ebola here."

He is one of hundreds of people, many of them children, working at one of Ituri's largest artisanal mines, where the Associated Press gained rare access. Miners crowd into pits to dig. Underground, shafts can run dozens of meters deep, with tunnels dug largely by hand and often little reinforcement. Above ground, others sift earth in open pits using shovels, pans and other basic tools. Pregnant women work there too, sometimes late in pregnancy, according to community worker Anna Ndroy Kansime.

Isaac says his parents and two of his brothers were killed in an attack by Congolese rebels. He now lives with his aunt and five siblings, and says she encouraged him to work at the mine. The AP could not reach her for comment. More than 100 armed groups operate in eastern Congo, including the Islamic State-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces and the CODECO militia in Ituri. Their fighting has displaced large numbers of people and deepened the poverty pushing families toward mining. About 2 million people work in artisanal and small-scale mining across Congo, according to a 2024 OECD report; there is no reliable recent count of children among them. UNICEF estimates 15% of Congolese children ages 5 to 17 are engaged in child labor.

The mines worry health officials for a specific reason: the people in them move. Miners travel between villages looking for gold and related work, and small traders carry the mineral between mining areas and population centers. Mari Ndika, an Ebola response worker involved in monitoring, said miners may encounter several communities as they travel, which can carry the virus along if one of them is infected. Kansime said health workers recently lost track of two miners identified as Ebola contacts after they moved to another site. "They left for a destination that, to this day, remains unknown," she said. There is no reliable system for registering mine workers or following their movements.

Prevention is also hard at the sites. Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or through contaminated objects and surfaces, yet handwashing and distancing are not practiced in the mines, and many mines are illegal, with miners trying to avoid local authorities. Singoma Aimé, a 36-year-old miner, said workers lack adequate protection and especially need handwashing facilities, since everyone arrives from home. No known reports place the outbreak inside any of Congo's mining sites, but officials say the true situation in hard-to-reach areas is hard to know, and that most new cases and deaths are among groups not being monitored.

The virus behind the outbreak is Bundibugyo, less common than other Ebola-causing viruses, and there are no specific treatments or vaccines for it. Spread across six provinces, it is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history, with 2,325 deaths and nearly 5,000 infections, almost 90% of them in Ituri. It would become the deadliest ever if it passes the West Africa outbreak of 2014-2016, which killed more than 11,000. Experts believe the virus was circulating in the mining town of Mongbwalu as early as February, months before authorities declared the outbreak on May 15.

It has also been moving outward. Last week Mercy Corps warned of cases along a major travel route about 35 kilometers (22 miles) from the South Sudan border, citing the outbreak's "widening footprint." Trish Newport, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), called the speed "extremely concerning" and said it continues to outpace efforts to track and slow it. "We see family members that come in who have had 15 people in their family die," she said, adding that response must scale up rapidly.

Ndika said the response includes educating miners about prevention and working with local authorities, mine managers and communities to identify and track suspected cases. Impassable roads, armed groups and the movement of people displaced by violence stand in the way, and Kansime said miners are not easy to slow down. "For many families, gold is what pays for food," she said. The question now is whether monitoring can reach the mines before the virus travels the trade routes toward the border.