News

The emerging crisis in eastern DR Congo and especially around the city of Goma, in the province of North Kivu, has worrying implications for cholera in the region. For approximately 2 years, our team, with the assistance of the non-governmental organisation HEAL Africa, has been spatially characterising these camps, using a process that involves monthly collection of spatially encoded videos, which can be interpreted for cholera risks.2–4 The initial relief camps on the eastern side of the city of Goma opened in mid-2022 along a northeastern major routeway (appendix) to accommodate people displaced because of volcanic activity to the north. These advances led to shelling of the city, fighting around the airport, and eventually the occupation of the city.5 DR Congo's Prime Minister reported at the end of February, 2025, that 7000 people had been killed in the region since the beginning of January, with estimates of numbers of displaced people ranging from 450 000 to 700 000.6 Counter to the claims of the rebel leaders, all relief camps, on both the east and west sides of the city, have now been cleared by M23 forces, with removal of the camps an apparent priority of the occupying forces, images from videos we took on Feb 7, 2025, compared with earlier dates, are shown in the appendix. Given the endemicity of cholera within the camps, together with reports of the presence of mpox clade 1b within the region,8 this forced movement out of the structured camps surrounding Goma represents a major humanitarian disaster with the potential for rapid dissemination of cholera and other infectious diseases across the entire region.