Mobile gold miners in eastern Congo complicate health workers' efforts to contain Ebola

IGA-BARRIÈRE, Congo -- Isaac Batisa spends his days digging for gold at a mining site in eastern Congo, hoping to earn enough money to support his family. He is among hundreds of people, many of them children, working at the artisanal gold mine in eastern Congo's Ituri province, where the country's fast-moving Ebola outbreak is concentrated.For the 11-year-old Batisa, though, his immediate concern is not the disease which has killed more than 2,300 people among at least 5,000 cases. He just wants to return home with some earnings, sometimes as little as $2 a day.“We don’t know about Ebola here,” he said.As the outbreak spreads and kills people faster than any other outbreak of the disease in history, a major source of concern for monitoring efforts is miners constantly on the move and in hard-to-reach, unsafe territories.The Associated Press gained rare access into one of Ituri's largest mines, in the locality of Iga-Barrière, where miners crowd into pits to dig for gold. Although there are no known reports of the outbreak reaching any of Congo's mining sites, officials say it's difficult to know the true situation in hard-to-reach areas. Most new cases and deaths are reported amon...