How Ebola Spreads Through Gold Mining

We've come to a small gold mine on the edge of Mongualu. There are gold mines everywhere in this town. Small mines, sometimes in people's backyards. There are larger businesses on the edge of town. And that's considered to be one of the factors that has helped to spread the disease from here to elsewhere. We are being taken to the mine by the chief of the Barou neighborhood on the edge of Mongualu. We came out into a space where there was a stream and then these sort of large pools of mud. Ebola is not a respiratory virus. It's a virus that is spread through touch and fluids. When I was there, I could really see how mining has actually been identified as one of the key vectors for the spread of this disease. We heard from people in the town that there's a large population of fruit bats in a forest near the town. It is clear that in between epidemics, the virus can reside in these populations of fruit bats. So we went in search of the forest and where we ended up actually was at a mine which had been closed for many years. These dark, disused mining shafts had provided an ideal location for these bats to live or to congregate before eventually coming out into the town. Mongualu is entirely a gold mining town. Gold mining has this large migrant population of laborers from across Congo and neighboring Uganda. Those laborers go back and forth. The gold itself is not just kept within the Congo. It's also exported across the borders into Uganda and South Sudan. All of those factors combined help to explain why gold mining is not just economic lifeblood of Mongualu, but also unfortunately has provided an excellent vehicle for transmission of this virus.