Jeanne still hears the whisper that came from nowhere and everywhere: “At the hospital they will give your child bad injections and he will die.” Her voice trembles as she repeats the words. Her six-year-old son had begun with a fever and vomiting, and in those first hours she told herself it was malaria. She did what many mothers do: she gave him medicine at home, cooled his forehead, and prayed for the fever to break. But the fever did not break. Around her, the rumors grew louder and more insistent. Ebola, people said, was invented to make money. Treatment centers were not places of healing, they said, but places of killing. Patients who entered would never come out alive. Every whispered sentence planted a seed of doubt. Jeanne loved her son too much to hand him over to a place that had been made to look like a trap. She could not bear the thought of carrying him through those doors, only to lose him. So she searched for another way. Her child needed care, but she was afraid to seek it. When at last she allowed him to be taken to a health facility, his small body was already failing. Forty-eight hours later, he died. The grief was not only the grief of a mother losing her child; it was the grief of knowing that fear had stolen precious days. Today she tells her story so that other families will not walk the same road. She says, her voice still fragile, “I ask all parents not to believe mis- and disinformation. As soon as a child is sick, you must go quickly to a health centre to receive appropriate care. I would not want another mother to live what I have lived.”
Jeanne did not wake up one morning with the intention of rejecting modern medicine. It was a slow surrender to the stories around her. When her son’s condition did not improve, she took him to a traditional healer, a man her family had trusted long before the outbreak. “I took my son to our healer. I had hope because he had treated our family for a long time,” she explains. The healer gave her remedies, but the virus did not stop. The child grew weaker, his eyes hollow, his arms thin. Yet the rumors did not weaken; they tightened their grip. People spoke of ambulances as hearses, of doctors as strangers who wanted to inject poison or harvest organs. Some claimed the epidemic was a commercial scheme, a way for outsiders to make money out of African suffering. Others repeated in low voices that anyone who entered a treatment unit would never return. Jeanne was caught between her own instinct and the terrifying picture painted by the community. The person who eventually showed courage was the traditional healer himself: he refused to continue treating the child and urged her to go to a health facility. By then, the boy could not fight anymore. “It was truly painful to lose my child. I deeply regret not going quickly to the health centre,” she says. That regret now lives inside her, but Salif Diarra, a social listening analyst at the World Health Organization, insists her decision should not be reduced to personal fault. “This mother wanted to protect her child,” he says. “But rumours fueled fear that influenced her decision. When a family sees the treatment centre as a threat, they may hesitate to seek help, even as their loved one’s condition deteriorates.” Jeanne’s story is not a judgment on her; it is a mirror held up to the disinformation that surrounded her.
Jeanne’s story is not an isolated tragedy. In the same communities, under the same whispered lies, other families have made the same choice: delay, hope, traditional medicine, then a final desperate rush to a hospital. Social listening teams at WHO and the Ministry of Health have documented this pattern for months. They monitor radio broadcasts, online forums, blog posts, social networks, and a toll-free number, 151, where people can ask questions and raise concerns. Between May and September 2026, more than 34,650 items of online content were analysed, including rumors, fears, and false claims. Three times a week, Ministry of Health and WHO teams sit together to review what communities are saying. They do not dismiss the rumors as ignorance; they take them seriously as signals of fear. Each story like Jeanne’s, each claim about lethal injections, each post saying Ebola is a lie, is entered into a system designed to understand why mistrust spreads. The teams ask themselves: What fear lies behind this message? Who is telling this story? What response will actually be believed? For Diarra, the goal is not to punish people who have been misled, but to respond to their concerns with respect. “Reliable information must be accessible, understandable and delivered by people communities trust,” he says. “We must listen to families’ fears and respond with respect.” This approach is the opposite of shouting at people from a distance. It begins with the same act Jeanne needed that day: someone hearing her fear and answering it without judgment.
These regular listening sessions are not theoretical. They lead to concrete actions in the field. In Rwampara health zone, demystification sessions were organized inside the very communities that were afraid of treatment centers. People were invited to ask questions, meet the health workers, see the facilities, and hear from survivors who had walked out alive. With WHO and partner support, health authorities also trained 100 traditional healers, 20 social media influencers, and 150 hotline operators to share reliable information in words that made sense to local families. Traditional healers, because they were already trusted, became bridges instead of rivals. Influencers used the same platforms that carried rumors to carry facts. Hotline operators learned to respond not with cold scripts but with empathy. In Ituri, a province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the strategy went even deeper. Community dialogues and public forums were held in villages where suspicion was high. Frédérick Mungobijira, who leads infodemic management in Ituri, remembers the Katogu health area, where rumors had created such strong resistance that response teams could not safely enter. “We organized community dialogues with local leaders to explain the disease and fight misinformation,” he says. Those meetings were not lectures. Elders spoke, asked difficult questions, challenged the answers, and slowly began to listen. After those exchanges, response teams were able to access communities that had previously been hostile. Since the start of the outbreak, more than 1,000 rumors have been addressed in Ituri alone. Each one is a small opening in a wall of fear. Each one is a chance for the next mother to reach a health center before it is too late.
For Jeanne, no intervention can bring her son back. Grief is now another landscape she must cross, and she is not crossing it alone. She attends regular sessions with a WHO psychologist, a person who does not tell her to forget but helps her carry the memory in a way that no longer crushes her. “The psychologist helps me a lot. He listens, advises and supports me. Today, I feel better,” she says. Her sister also speaks about the burden the family carries. “Some people said it was dangerous to take a sick person to the hospital, that they might never return alive,” she says. Her voice is angry and sad at once. She remembers the little boy, full of life, running around the compound, laughing, making noise. “Today, we stay close to our sister, listen to her and encourage her to overcome this ordeal. We are all deeply affected. The little one was full of life,” she says. The family has become a small circle of resistance against guilt and despair. They remind Jeanne that she acted out of love, that the lies around her were loud and relentless, and that her child was not the only victim of the epidemic of fear. Yet grief is not neat. It returns in the shape of a small shoe, an empty mat, a plate set for a child who will not eat. The psychologist gives her tools to breathe, to sleep, to look toward the future. Slowly, she begins to accept that she can still be a mother in memory, and a voice for the living.
Restoring trust is not a one-time campaign. It is a daily commitment to listen. Diarra returns to the same idea again and again: if a community believes the health system is a threat, information alone will not change that. It must be accompanied by respect, by answers, and by people who are known and believed. The WHO-backed response has learned to work through local leaders, traditional healers, religious figures, and survivors. It has learned that a rumor cannot be killed by silence; it must be replaced by conversation. Jeanne’s testimony is part of that conversation. Her child is gone, but her voice has a purpose. She does not want pity; she wants action. She wants mothers to know that fear is the second virus, and that it can be just as deadly. “I ask all parents not to believe mis- and disinformation,” she says. “As soon as a child is sick, you must go quickly to a health centre to receive appropriate care. I would not want another mother to live what I have lived.” Her plea is simple, and yet it is the most difficult thing in an outbreak: trust the people who are there to save you, even when fear whispers otherwise. She will never know if an early trip to the health center would have saved her son. But she knows that rumors stole precious days, and that no mother should have to fight both a disease and the lies surrounding it. In her voice there is heartbreak, but there is also warning. Ebola kills. Disinformation kills too, one whispered sentence at a time. The response must move at the speed of trust, because the next child’s life may depend on it.