Skip to content
Welcome, thoughtbot's Giant Robots listeners!Start here
Pandemics and Biosecurity
3OCT

Unpaid Ituri health workers walk off

2 min read
13:42UTC

Front-line health workers in Ituri Province have walked off or threatened to strike over unpaid hazard pay and delayed salaries, according to Al Jazeera reporting.

← Back to River boat carries Ebola 1,000 km downriverJump to analysis ↓
ScienceDeveloping
Key takeaway

Unpaid Ituri health workers are striking even as pledges to the Ebola response near a billion dollars.

Front-line health workers in Ituri Province have walked off the job or threatened to strike over unpaid hazard pay and delayed salaries, according to Al Jazeera reporting⁠1. The province is the epicentre of the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak, where isolating patients quickly is the task the whole response turns on.

Aggregate pledges to the response passed roughly $990 million by mid-June, yet that money has struggled to reach the pay packets of the people staffing the isolation wards. Ituri is a conflict-affected province where the ADF and M23 insurgencies constrain governance and logistics, so cash committed in Addis Ababa or Geneva does not translate cleanly into wages paid in Bunia. A strike removes the one input the outbreak cannot spare: trained hands to run the isolation wards.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Hazard pay is extra money paid to workers doing dangerous jobs, like treating patients with a deadly disease. In outbreaks like this one, health workers are often promised this money but do not always receive it on time. In Ituri Province, DR Congo, front-line health workers walked off the job or threatened to strike because their hazard pay and regular salaries had not arrived, according to Al Jazeera. This matters because an Ebola response depends entirely on having enough trained staff willing and able to keep working.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

Africa CDC only gained direct-implementation status from the Pandemic Fund Governing Board on 17 June, meaning donor money pledged at the 26 May summit, nearly $500 million, can now reach the response without routing through WHO or the World Bank first. That accreditation is weeks old; the disbursement chain from pledge to a paid worker's bank account still runs through national payroll systems that have not caught up with the money already committed.

Ituri's frontline staff are also drawn from the same under-resourced provincial health system that existed before the outbreak, so hazard pay was never built into standing salary structures and instead depends on ad hoc allowances, the first thing delayed when funds are in transit.

Sources:Al Jazeera
Mentions:Ituri Province →Al Jazeera →Bunia →Addis Ababa →DR Congo →Liberia →Geneva →Sierra Leone →Bundibugyo ebolavirus →World Bank →Africa CDC →Pandemic Fund →African Union →West Africa →
First Reported In

Update #10 · Ebola's responders are now the casualties

Al Jazeera· 14 Jul 2026
Read original →
Causes and effects
This Event
Unpaid Ituri health workers walk off
A response funded near a billion dollars can still fail if the money does not reach the workers who staff the wards.
Led to
Ebola staff abandon a Bunia ward
The 9 July hazard-pay strike threat became the actual ward abandonment reported this week.
Occurred 18 Jul 2026
Read story →
A second Ebola centre walks out on pay
Elikya's strike extends the hazard-pay dispute first reported across Ituri on 9 July.
Occurred 25 Jul 2026
Read story →
Different Perspectives
IGWG co-chair Tovar da Silva Nunes
IGWG co-chair Tovar da Silva Nunes
The Brazilian co-chair closed the eighth pathogen-sharing session on 18 September without an agreed annex text, the second session in a row to end that way. He presented the outcome as continued commitment, with adoption due at the World Health Assembly in May 2027.
Fraport
Fraport
The Frankfurt Airport operator has told staff to watch for fever, hessenschau reported, after six airport workers caught malaria. Germany does not require insecticide spraying of arriving aircraft cabins, and parasite genotyping to trace the source is due at the end of October.
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
ECDC reported the eight Frankfurt Airport malaria cases on 18 September and considers repeated arrivals of infected mosquitoes on aircraft likely. It has not ruled out local mosquitoes, and awaits genotyping due at the end of October.
Pan American Health Organization
Pan American Health Organization
PAHO counted 53,957 measles cases in the Americas by 19 September and is supporting Peru's response in Puno and Arequipa. It warns that October's Señor de los Milagros festivities and Pope Leo XIV's November visit could increase transmission.
Bangladesh Directorate General of Health Services
Bangladesh Directorate General of Health Services
The DGHS recorded 1,030 measles-related deaths and 172,720 suspected cases by 14 September, after a campaign that reached 19.75 million children. Its disease-control director, Halimur Rashid, said further vaccination rounds were expected within two weeks.
Minapharm
Minapharm
The Egyptian drugmaker and its Berlin subsidiary ProBioGen were awarded up to US$16.5m by CEPI on 27 August to take a Bundibugyo vaccine into a Phase 1 trial in Africa. Final manufacture is planned for Cairo, making it CEPI's first Bundibugyo candidate with an African producer.