Richard Valery Mouzoko Kiboung

Abstract

Public health physician, epidemiologist and front-line responder to Ebola outbreak. Born in Bafia, Cameroon, on May 31, 1977, he was killed during an attack on Butembo University Hospital in DR Congo on April 19, 2019, aged 41 years. As a medical student at the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon, Richard Valery Mouzoko Kiboung was the person other students turned to for help. When Boghuma Titanji, who was 4 years behind Kiboung, asked to borrow some lecture notes, he shared with her all the information he had from his first year. “From then, every time I ran into him, he was always checking in and making sure that things were okay. Telling me that if I needed any help, he was available”, said Titanji, who is now an Infectious Diseases Fellow at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, USA. Kiboung's kindness and generosity, she said, defined his life and his work. Colleagues said that these characteristics motivated him to volunteer to assist in the response to the ongoing outbreak of Ebola virus disease in northeastern DR Congo, where he was deployed by WHO to lead the response team at the Butembo University Hospital's Ebola treatment centre. “He wanted to assist people in this difficult situation”, said Soterine Tsanga, a communications officer at the WHO Country Office in Cameroon, who worked with Kiboung there. Massongo Massongo, an infectious diseases specialist in Cameroon, grew up with Kiboung in Bafia and attended medical school a year ahead of him. He said they both knew from childhood that they were committed to “helping people, to bringing relief. I think he was also encouraged by his late father, who was a nurse and had a long experience in the public health field”. During medical school, Kiboung was active in medical missions, travelling with trained physicians to remote parts of the country to provide medical care. Even after completing the 7-year programme at the University of Yaoundé I in 2004, Titanji said he returned to help lead the missions “because he wanted to mentor people and go and help people who would not be able to access care”. After graduating and working in the public health system in Cameroon, Kiboung took over a government effort to improve services to prevent and treat malaria in Cameroon's northern Adamawa region. That work became the focus of the thesis he wrote while pursuing a master's degree in public health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp (ITM), Belgium, which he completed in 2013. Veerle Vanlerberghe, a senior researcher in ITM's Department of Public Health and Kiboung's thesis promoter, said, “When he was here, he was eager to know what is the effect of all of this work? He was a professional and wanted to learn more and also to apply it to see what he could do better.” He returned to ITM for a course on health policy in 2014. And after a brief stint working with WHO in Chad on the Polio Eradication Initiative, he returned to Cameroon in 2015. Working with WHO there he also focused on polio eradication and surveillance activities for vaccine-preventable diseases. Tsanga remembers him as “calm, organised, honest, and wise”. Kiboung had only been in DR Congo for 4 weeks when he was killed but had already shown his commitment to ending the outbreak. André Mbeko Pongombo, who was working as a WHO consultant alongside him in DR Congo, said Kiboung told his colleagues, “we are here for a cause, for a reason and this reason is to save human lives”. In the Ebola outbreak in west Africa that began in 2013, “our Congolese brothers were with us to stop Ebola”, Pongombo recalls Kiboung saying, “and now that Ebola strikes for the tenth time in Congo, we are here to support our brothers”. Kiboung was killed after armed men burst into a staff meeting at Butembo University Hospital and opened fire. The Ebola response in DR Congo has been met with some community distrust and health workers have come under attack. “With the murder of Dr Richard Mouzoko the world of public health and WHO, in particular, lost someone exceptional”, Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, told The Lancet. “Dr Richard had great impact in his short life and helped make countless lives healthier. He was a doctor, a humanitarian and a hero—an example for us all. He died on the front-lines of the Ebola response. We will end the Ebola outbreak and in so doing ensure his legacy lives on.“ Kiboung was honoured at the 2019 World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, and is survived by his wife, Friquette Tata, and his four children, Beleck Margaret, Moulong Simon, Wolimum Emmanuelle, and Amewock Nathan.