Geneva:
The Red Cross expressed alarm on Tuesday about the risk of fighting in the besieged rubber rubber city could cause ebola samples and other pathogens that remain in a laboratory to escape.
The International Red Cross Committee is “very concerned about the situation in the laboratory of the National Biomedical Research Institute, which faces a risk of energy cuts,” said the regional director of the ICRC for Africa Patrick Youssef.
Speaking to journalists in Geneva, he emphasized the importance of “preserving the samples that can be affected by clashes”, warning “unimaginable consequences if the (samples), including the Ebola virus, which contains were going to spread.”
Youssef stressed that the laboratory was “very close” of the Ciccr delegation in rubber, but had no information on the safety of other laboratories in the city.
The main city in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has become a battlefield from the combatants of the M23 armed group led by the TUTSI and the Rwandan forces entered the rubber center on Sunday after a week .
The east -rich minerals of the vast country of Central Africa have been plagued by struggles between armed groups, backed by regional rivals, from the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Half a million people in the region have been forced from their homes since the beginning of the year, the UN refugee agency said Monday.
Rubber, a city of one million near the border with Rwanda, was already home to approximately 700,000 people internally displaced.
The ICRC expressed alarm for the impact of the increase in the fight on civilians, warning in a statement that he had seen a “massive influx of people injured by explosive shots and ammunition in facilities backed by the ICRC”, including the CBCA hospital. Eraser.
The organization said that since the beginning of the month, its staff had treated more than 600 injured, almost half of them civilians and many of them women and children.
“The wounded are transported by motorcycle, others by bus or with the help of volunteers of the Congolesa Red Cross,” Myriam Favier, head of the Cicr Cicr in rubber, said in the statement.
“Civilians are being seriously injured by bullets or shrapnel,” he said, describing how some patients were “lying on the floor due to lack of space.”
Francois Moreillon, head of the Dr Congo delegation of the ICRC, said the organization was “receiving a large number of calls from people who are injured, defenseless and left to fend for themselves.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a union feed).
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