A nurse is killed in an attack on Ebola responders in Congo, and other health workers shelter under police guard

A nurse who spent his working life teaching his own town how to survive Ebola is dead, killed by people from that town.

The nurse worked at the general hospital in Bafwasende, in Tshopo province in eastern Congo, where he helped residents understand the disease and protect themselves from it. A local health official told Reuters that youths attacked and killed him on Friday while he was responding to an Ebola alert, and that a colleague survived the attack and is recovering in hospital. The World Health Organization announced the attack on Sunday night. Its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, wrote that a nurse was killed and a health worker severely injured while responding to an Ebola alert on Saturday, and that everyone working to protect communities from the disease must be able to work in dignity and safety.

"We are shocked at how the population turned against this nurse. It is impossible to believe that he was mistaken for a stranger," the local health official told Reuters. The rest of the town's health workers are now sheltering at the general hospital under police guard. "None of the nurses have slept at their homes because they fear for their security," the official said. The army briefly deployed to the area. The official said youths in the area had previously attacked another colleague and set his house on fire.

The United Nations' senior Ebola response coordinator, Julien Harnies, condemned the killing and called for a thorough investigation. He told UN News that the town is a community of artisanal miners with a limited police presence, and that fear of the epidemic and fear of death fed an explosive situation. Reports from the area said youths accused the responders of contaminating water sources and spreading the disease before they attacked them. The WHO's Africa director blamed misinformation and fear for violence against responders.

The attack lands in the middle of the worst Ebola outbreak Congo has recorded. The country's public health institute reported 9,964 confirmed cases on Friday, with a fatality rate of about 48.6 percent, since the outbreak of the Bundibugyo species of the virus was declared in May, as of October 23. Tshopo is one of eight provinces fighting the outbreak, and cases have crossed into Kenya and Nigeria. Attacks on hospitals, vehicles and response staff have run through the whole effort, and every attack costs the response time it does not have: when responders cannot enter a community, nobody traces the contacts of the sick, and the virus moves in the dark.