BELGIQUE PERSPECTIVE

Belgium covers Ebola through the most natural channel for the country: the medical expertise of the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM), which has been training specialists in tropical diseases for a century in direct connection with its former colonies in central Africa. VRT NWS publishes an interview with Dr. Laurens Liesenborghs, an infectious disease specialist who arrived in Bunia on Saturday evening with his team, and the Flemish daily highlights a brutal formula: 'the virus is deeply rooted in the region.' The expression summarizes the difficulty now faced by international reinforcements - not just containing a hotspot, but uprooting an epidemic that has been circulating for weeks in a low-key manner.

Liesenborghs shares operational numbers that agency dispatches do not report: out of 1,000 suspected cases and 246 deaths, 'it is likely that most cases remain undetected'; barely 20% of high-risk contacts are correctly followed up; and the testing capacity, which started at 40 per day, has now risen to 300 thanks to the arrival of reagents. It is this capacity that also allows the Belgian team to test a treatment already effective in the lab on animals, in the hope of reducing mortality. The doctor reiterates MSF's observation: 'never have so many cases been recorded so early after the official announcement of a hotspot.'

The Belgian singularity lies in this historical continuity. The Ebola virus itself was co-identified in 1976 by Peter Piot, then a young researcher at the ITM sent to investigate a hemorrhagic fever in Zaïre. Fifty years later, it is still Antwerp that sends an infectious disease specialist to Bunia, it is still Kinshasa that is the epicenter, and it is still a poorly understood variant - Bundibugyo this time - that catches the medical community off guard. Without saying it, the Belgian coverage inscribes Ebola in a memory that goes beyond the urgency of the day: that of a health partnership that decolonization has not erased, and which remains one of the few channels through which Belgium still weighs in central Africa. The tone is sober, technical, without any overt patriotism - but the doctor sent is named, identified, staged as the Flemish voice on the ground. It is a coverage that says the pride of a know-how validated by the WHO and the Congolese.