The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) in response to a fast-spreading Ebola outbreak caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has already claimed more than 80 lives across two countries. This marks the 17th Ebola outbreak the Central African nation has faced, with public health experts warning of extreme risks of regional and cross-border spread amid a lack of targeted medical countermeasures.
The first confirmed case in Goma, a major population hub in eastern DRC currently held by the Rwanda-backed M23 militia, was verified by national laboratory testing on Sunday, amplifying global alarm over the outbreak’s trajectory. According to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), as of Saturday, the outbreak has been linked to 88 confirmed deaths and 336 suspected cases of the highly contagious haemorrhagic fever.
Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director of the Congolese National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB), detailed that the Goma patient is the widow of an Ebola victim who died in the northeastern city of Bunia. The woman, already infected when she traveled to Goma after her husband’s death, represents the first confirmed case in a major urban center, raising fears of wider community transmission.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the emergency declaration via the social platform X, noting that while the outbreak qualifies as a PHEIC— the global body’s second-highest alert level under the International Health Regulations (IHR), with a pandemic classified as the highest— it does not yet meet the formal criteria for a pandemic. The WHO emphasized that critical gaps remain in understanding the outbreak’s full scale, writing, “There are significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread.”
A core challenge facing response teams is the nature of the strain itself. Unlike the more common Zaire Ebola strain, for which effective vaccines are widely available, the Bundibugyo strain— first identified in 2007— has no licensed vaccine or specific antiviral treatment. DRC Health Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba highlighted the strain’s extreme virulence, noting that its fatality rate can reach 50 percent. By comparison, the Zaire strain has a recorded fatality rate of 60 to 90 percent, but the availability of vaccines and treatments has drastically reduced mortality in recent outbreaks.
The current outbreak was first confirmed in Ituri Province, a northeastern region bordering Uganda and South Sudan, on August 15. Local civil society representative Isaac Nyakulinda told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that communities in the affected area have been struggling to cope for weeks. “We’ve been seeing people die for the past two weeks,” Nyakulinda said. “There is nowhere to isolate the sick. They are dying at home and their bodies are being handled by their family members, increasing the risk of further transmission.”
Congolese health officials traced the outbreak back to an index case, a nurse who first presented with Ebola symptoms at a Bunia health facility on April 24. Early symptoms of Ebola include fever, vomiting, and haemorrhaging, progressing to severe organ failure and internal bleeding in advanced cases. The virus, which is thought to originate in bat populations, spreads between humans through direct contact with bodily fluids or infected blood; victims only become contagious once symptoms develop, and the incubation period can last up to 21 days.
On Saturday, officials confirmed that the outbreak has already crossed international borders, with one Congolese national dying of the disease in neighboring Uganda. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders), the leading medical aid group working on the ground, is mobilizing for a large-scale emergency response, but has flagged multiple barriers to effective action.
“The number of cases and deaths we are seeing in such a short timeframe, combined with the spread across several health zones and now across the border, is extremely concerning,” said Trish Newport, MSF’s Emergency Programme Manager. The DRC’s poor transport and communications infrastructure, a longstanding challenge for public health responses, has slowed the movement of critical medical supplies to affected regions. The country, home to more than 100 million people and four times the size of France, has limited paved road networks in remote rural areas where the outbreak first took hold.
Most of the early transmission has occurred in hard-to-reach areas, meaning only a small share of suspected cases have been confirmed via laboratory testing. Even so, the WHO says early indicators point to a far larger outbreak than currently documented: high positivity rates from initial tested samples, cross-border transmission, and rising numbers of suspected cases “all point towards a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected and reported, with significant local and regional risk of spread.”
This outbreak comes just months after DRC declared an end to its previous Ebola outbreak in the same region, which was declared eradicated in December 2024 after killing 34 people. Since Ebola was first identified in 1976, the virus has killed roughly 15,000 people across Africa, despite major medical advances in prevention and treatment over the past decade. The 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC remains the deadliest in the country’s history, killing nearly 2,300 people before it was contained.