分类： health

BUNIA, Democratic Republic of Congo — A worsening Ebola outbreak in the eastern region of the country has hit a grim new milestone, with confirmed infections climbing to 1,003 and confirmed deaths totaling 254, according to an official statement released by Congolese health authorities late Sunday.

Since the outbreak was first declared on May 15, the virus has been concentrated primarily in Ituri province, where 100 infected patients have successfully recovered to date, the Congolese Ministry of Health confirmed.

What makes this outbreak particularly alarming is that it is driven by the rare Bundibugyo Ebola virus, a strain for which no approved vaccines or specific targeted treatments currently exist. In its first month of spread, the outbreak already became the most severe recorded event caused by this specific strain, and health officials have acknowledged that the true scale of the crisis is likely far larger than current confirmed numbers suggest. Many unreported cases are still undetected across the affected region, and top health leaders warn that the outbreak has not yet reached its highest point.

Contact tracing, a core public health intervention to stop Ebola transmission, remains a major unmet challenge for local response teams. As of the latest update, only 55 percent of required contact tracing has been completed across the affected zone. Compounding these challenges, response teams have not yet been able to identify the index case, also known as patient zero, that sparked the current outbreak. As of last week, more than 35,000 people who have had documented exposure to infected individuals are still awaiting contact tracing and monitoring.

KINSHASA – A public health emergency in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues to escalate, with official data releasing Saturday showing confirmed Ebola infections have climbed to 956, and the cumulative death toll from the outbreak has reached 247. The update comes from the country’s national health authorities in their latest epidemiological situation report.

On Friday alone, 23 new positive Ebola diagnoses and two additional fatalities were recorded across two high-risk eastern provinces: Ituri and North Kivu. Ituri, the current epicenter of the outbreak, bears the overwhelming majority of the national caseload, with 874 confirmed infections and 201 deaths accounting for over 91 percent of all confirmed cases nationwide.

Per the report, 92 patients have successfully recovered from the virus and been discharged from care, while 361 confirmed patients are currently undergoing isolation or inpatient treatment at designated health facilities. An additional 162 people are under investigation as suspected cases as of Friday. One key gap in the national outbreak response has been identified: the contact-tracing rate, which currently sits at just 69.3 percent, far below the 95 percent target health officials set to effectively interrupt chains of virus transmission.

During a press briefing held Friday evening, DRC Health Minister Roger Kamba confirmed that the outbreak is still in an expansionary phase. Kamba noted that as response teams scale up active case searching operations and extend their reach into more remote, heavily affected communities, further increases in confirmed case counts are expected in the coming weeks.

The health minister added that public health officials will not be able to declare the outbreak has reached its peak, plateaued, or entered a decline until weekly case counts show consistent stabilization or a sustained downward trend. Until that point, Kamba emphasized, all core response efforts including aggressive case detection, immediate patient isolation and treatment, and deeper community engagement must be sustained and expanded.

This current outbreak, caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus, was first officially declared by DRC public health authorities on May 15 this year.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – The African continent’s leading public health body has issued an urgent call for African governments to ramp up domestic financing to contain the ongoing Ebola outbreak spreading across the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, while stressing the critical need to end the continent’s long-standing reliance on international partners for emergency health responses. Since the outbreak was first detected on May 15, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) confirms it has already killed more than 200 people among 894 confirmed cases, with more than 35,000 exposed contacts still to be fully traced. Public health experts warn the actual case count is likely higher, as the outbreak was only identified weeks after it first began spreading through local communities.

BUNIA, Democratic Republic of Congo – On a somber Friday morning in eastern Congo, hundreds of mourners gathered to lay to rest a six-month-old girl, the latest fatality from the country’s escalating Ebola outbreak and the third child from a local orphanage to lose their life to the virus in recent weeks. As the small pine coffin was carried to its final resting place, attendees held small wooden crosses and stood several meters apart to reduce infection risk, while only trained health workers clad in full personal protective equipment (PPE) – including face masks, thick gloves, and fluid-resistant gowns – were permitted to lower the casket. A Catholic priest led the brief funeral service, offering prayers for the infant and comfort to grieving community members.

“It is a profound sadness to lose one of our own, a child of this congregation,” said Father Innocent Ndogo, opening the service. “As we have always believed, the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.”

The ongoing outbreak, caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, is centered in Congo’s Ituri region, which has recorded more than 90% of all confirmed cases to date. Efforts to contain the spread have been severely hampered by repeated community clashes with response teams, rooted in longstanding distrust of public health measures and anger over altered burial practices that are required to stop transmission. The outbreak response has also faced criticism for its occasional militarization, which has further alienated local populations.

Unlike the more common Zaire strain of Ebola – which has driven 16 of Congo’s previous outbreaks and has an approved, effective vaccine – the Bundibugyo strain has no licensed treatment or preventative vaccine. For many frontline workers, even basic PPE remains in short supply, leaving them exposed to the virus as they carry out critical contact tracing and safe burial work. Early in the outbreak, diagnostic testing for Bundibugyo was not widely available, meaning cases were misidentified as the more common Zaire strain, allowing the virus to spread undetected for weeks – a gap that public health officials now cite as a key reason for the outbreak’s current scale.

During an official visit to Bunia on the same day as the funeral, Congolese Health Minister Roger Kamba released the latest official case count, confirming 933 confirmed infections and 245 deaths across affected regions. To expand access to care, Kamba announced that all healthcare facilities in Ituri would offer free Ebola-related treatment moving forward, and that hazard pay bonuses for frontline healthcare workers would be doubled to retain critical staff during the crisis.

Africa Centres for Disease Control (Africa CDC) updated their contact tracing data a day prior, reporting that more than 35,000 people who may have been exposed to the virus are currently being monitored, one of the largest contact tracing operations the continent has seen in recent years. While the current outbreak has caused hundreds of deaths, it remains far less severe than the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people across multiple countries.

Alex Lock, communications officer at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which is supporting the outbreak response, warned against global indifference to the crisis, noting the human cost of each new case. “She was a baby. She had her whole life ahead of her. Unfortunately, she was taken by the disease, a disease that, as you know, is transmitted from one person to another,” Lock said, emphasizing the urgent need for additional global support.

Though the outbreak is concentrated in Ituri, cases have now been recorded in neighboring North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, and the virus has crossed the international border into Uganda. Ugandan health authorities have confirmed 19 cases and two deaths linked to the Congo outbreak, prompting regional public health alerts. Donors and global health organizations have begun deploying additional resources, but many response teams warn that more support is urgently needed to stop the outbreak from spreading further across East Africa.

An ongoing Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) took an unexpected turn earlier this week, when a 6-year-old confirmed Ebola patient—abducted from her treatment ward by armed men alongside her mother—has been located and is reported to be in stable condition. Local health official Dr. Lubambo Maboko Gaston confirmed the update to the BBC on Friday, two days after he first announced the abduction that drew international attention to growing unrest around Ebola response efforts in the region.

According to Dr. Gaston, the pair were taken by a group of armed, angry men from a hospital in Butembo, a major city in eastern DRC, on Monday. It remains unclear whether the abductors had prior personal connections to the child or her family, but the abduction fits a pattern of rising hostility toward Ebola treatment facilities that has hampered outbreak response for weeks. On Friday, the girl and her mother voluntarily arrived at an alternative Ebola treatment center located roughly 18 kilometers outside Butembo, where medical teams have since assessed the child’s condition as stable and improving. “Her condition is currently considered stable,” Dr. Gaston confirmed in a statement to reporters.

Hostility toward outbreak response teams is not a new development during this outbreak. To date, the event has killed more than 230 people and recorded 890 confirmed cases across eastern DRC, with treatment centers facing repeated attacks from local communities driven by fear and misinformation. Just last month, police in Mongbwalu were forced to fire warning shots into the air to disperse angry crowds that attempted to seize the bodies of Ebola victims from a local health facility. Days prior, residents of Rwampara, a small town 85 kilometers southeast of Mongbwalu, set fire to hospital isolation tents after officials blocked them from retrieving the body of a man who had died from suspected Ebola.

Public health experts stress that the bodies of Ebola victims carry extremely high viral loads, and unsanctioned burial preparations are a major driver of new transmission. Safe, regulated burial protocols are one of the most critical tools for containing spread, but deep-rooted misinformation has left many local residents distrustful of these measures. “People are not properly informed or sensitised about what is happening,” local politician Luc Malembe explained to the BBC last month. “For a certain segment of the population, especially in remote areas, Ebola is an invention by outsiders – it does not exist. They believe it is the NGOs and hospitals creating this to make money, and this is tragic.”

The outbreak was officially declared by DRC authorities on May 15, though public health officials later confirmed that transmission had gone undetected in remote communities for weeks before the declaration. A complicating factor for response teams is that the outbreak is caused by Bundibugyo, a rare strain of Ebola that currently has no approved vaccine. The World Health Organization (WHO) has projected it could take months to develop and deploy an effective vaccine for this strain.

The scale of the outbreak has already drawn grim projections from global health leaders. This week, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the outbreak could become one of the largest Ebola events in recorded history, echoing an earlier assessment from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cross-border spread has already been recorded in neighboring Uganda, which has confirmed 19 cases and two deaths since the outbreak began. However, the WHO reported this week that Uganda has not recorded any new confirmed cases since June 5, a hopeful sign that containment measures there are working.

In DRC, the national ministry of health has said it is ramping up core response measures, including expanding community surveillance, scaling up contact tracing, and building out dedicated treatment infrastructure across affected towns. The WHO has committed $3.9 million to response efforts, while Africa CDC has approved a $319 million budget to support coordinated action across the region.

Nearly all confirmed cases are concentrated in three eastern DRC provinces: Ituri, South Kivu and North Kivu—the same region where the 6-year-old patient was abducted. Ituri remains the epicenter of transmission, accounting for more than 90% of all confirmed infections. Ongoing armed conflict in the region has created additional barriers to effective response, the WHO has warned. The M23 rebel group currently controls large swathes of both North and South Kivu, leaving response teams unable to access many remote communities where transmission may be spreading undetected.

DAKAR, SENEGAL – Just one month after the Ebola outbreak was formally detected across the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern region and neighboring Uganda, the death toll has surpassed 200, marking it the most severe early-stage Ebola outbreak on record, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) confirmed in a Thursday briefing.

Dr. Wessam Mankoula, a medical epidemiologist with Africa CDC, told reporters that the outbreak has already recorded 894 confirmed cases as of this week—three times the caseload seen at the same 30-day mark during Uganda’s 2000 Ebola outbreak, which registered 224 cases at the corresponding point. The higher current count is partially explained by delayed detection: health authorities only confirmed the outbreak’s existence on May 15, weeks after community transmission was first suspected. Since last week alone, confirmed cases have jumped 38%, and the virus has already spread to 32 separate health zones across eastern Congo.

What makes this outbreak particularly dangerous is its strain: it is caused by the rare Bundibugyo Ebola virus, for which no approved vaccines or specific antiviral treatments exist. Early testing did not screen for this less common variant, as most of Congo’s 16 previous Ebola outbreaks were linked to the Zaire strain, a more widespread variant for which effective vaccines are already available. As of this week, 74 infected patients across the affected region have recovered, and researchers are currently advancing development of experimental treatments including targeted monoclonal antibodies for Bundibugyo.

Over 90% of all confirmed cases are concentrated in Congo’s eastern Ituri Province, with additional cases detected in North Kivu and South Kivu provinces. The virus has already crossed the international border into Uganda, where 19 confirmed cases and two deaths have been documented to date.

Public health officials are facing steep barriers to bringing the outbreak under control, starting with critical gaps in contact tracing. Africa CDC estimates that for the 894 confirmed cases, between 17,000 and 35,000 close contacts should be monitored for symptoms. As of Thursday, only roughly 4,000 contacts—less than 15% of the projected total—have been located and are under active evaluation.

“We are still far from controlling the situation of this outbreak,” Mankoula said, noting that long-running insecurity and geographic isolation in Ituri have hobbled tracing efforts. Decades of armed conflict in the province have displaced nearly one million people, according to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, leading to constant population movement as communities flee violence. Ituri’s dense forests, underdeveloped road infrastructure, and scattered remote villages mean accessing affected communities can take multiple days of travel. Tracing efforts are further complicated by the large population of artisanal miners working in the region’s mineral-rich interior, who move frequently between isolated mining sites with little official oversight.

Compounding these challenges are critical gaps in funding and personnel. Of the more than $900 million in international pledges committed to the outbreak response, only $90 million has actually been disbursed to frontline response teams, Mankoula said. Africa CDC estimates it requires 540 trained response personnel to fully address the crisis, and currently has only 84 staff deployed to the affected region.

Mankoula added that the organization is working urgently to accelerate the release of committed funds, saying: “We’re keeping our fingers crossed those new pledges will be fast tracked, and we’ll be following up with different member states and different partners about their commitment to turn those pledges into actual money released to their affected countries or partners.”

In the bustling, unusually quiet Nyamurongo cemetery of Bunia, the capital of Ituri province in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, fresh mounds of dirt dot the grassy ground at a rate no resident has seen before. This city sits at the epicenter of an ongoing Ebola outbreak that has claimed nearly 200 lives in recent months, and every new grave tells a story of devastating loss and a desperate fight to stop the virus’s spread.

For Joel Lonza Makumbu, the devastation of the outbreak is not an abstract public health statistic—it is a personal catastrophe that has gutted his entire family. Standing knee-deep in the soil of his mother’s fresh grave, just one day after burying his father, Makumbu describes this as his sixth trip to the cemetery in a short stretch of weeks. Ebola has already taken his parents, three sisters, and a brother-in-law, and three more of his relatives remain in treatment centers fighting the disease. “I want to say for all people [to hear] that Ebola is true,” he stresses, a urgent warning to those who still doubt the danger of the virus amid widespread local misinformation.

The current outbreak is driven by the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which kills roughly one in four people it infects. Transmitted exclusively through direct contact with infected bodily fluids—including blood, semen, breast milk, vomit, and urine—the virus demands strict public health protocols to halt transmission, and modified, safe burial practices are widely recognized as one of the most critical interventions to stop new infections.

Traditional Ituri funeral customs are deeply rooted in community and cultural belief: for generations, families have washed and dressed the deceased in fine clothing—women often in wedding gowns, complete with makeup—before holding multi-day ceremonies full of singing and celebration, as community members believe death is a journey to the world of ancestors, not an end. Many of these long-held practices, however, put grieving family members at extreme risk of infection, so public health teams have had to negotiate sensitive changes to these rituals.

Today, no large crowds of mourners gather at Nyamurongo, and the traditional pre-burial body washing carried out by family members is strongly discouraged. Burials that once took days of preparation now are completed in 10 minutes, with the Ebola deceased immediately sealed in leak-proof body bags before interment. But rather than forcing communities to abandon their traditions entirely, international aid groups have worked to adapt safety protocols to honor cultural needs, wherever possible without putting lives at risk.

“We need to be very close to the communities and engage with them very closely and make sure that they understand what’s going on, they’re informed and they consent,” explains Maria Munoz-Bertrand, public health emergency coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC). To accommodate families, the IFRC now places sealed body bags inside solid coffins fitted with small transparent panels that allow mourners to glimpse their loved one’s body; some body bags even have clear film at the top to reveal the deceased’s face. “If the family asks for something special to be included in the procedure, as long as it respects the infection prevention and control measures, and it doesn’t put anyone at risk, we will try to accommodate the wishes of the family as much as possible, because we understand that it’s a very difficult time for families,” Munoz-Bertrand adds.

On a recent trip with an IFRC burial team to collect a body from Bunia’s Ebola treatment centre, the delicate balance of grief, culture and safety is on full display. Outside a makeshift transit morgue tent, family members wait along the roadside to accompany their loved one to the cemetery, including one grieving mother who had just lost her child to the virus. Health workers in full personal protective equipment seal the body bag inside the coffin, disinfect their path, and retreat, before six IFRC volunteers, also fully protected, retrieve the coffin for transport.

For 34-year-old mother of four, whose body the team retrieved that day, her father Simone Nyal watches the modified process from a distance, still reeling from how quickly the virus took his daughter. “She was ill for just one week before she succumbed. She has left us her four children – I don’t know how we will cope,” he says. At the cemetery, the woman’s mother and sister wait by the open grave, and the burial is completed in less than 10 minutes. Volunteers decontaminate their gear and depart, leaving gravediggers to fill the plot.

Negotiating these changes requires a unique blend of cultural literacy and patience, says Julienne Anoko, an anthropologist working with the World Health Organization (WHO) who has responded to multiple Ebola outbreaks across Central and West Africa. Anoko and her team spend days listening to grieving families, acknowledging their pain, and drawing on local cultural knowledge to help communities accept the necessary changes to burial practices.

The most challenging negotiations, Anoko says, surround the burial of pregnant women who die of Ebola. Local tradition holds that a pregnant woman must “travel light” to the afterlife, requiring the fetus to be removed before burial—a practice that would expose family members to massive amounts of infectious bodily fluids. To address this, Anoko frames the restriction through a cultural lens, explaining to communities that their own ancestors would have approved of the modified practice to protect the living. “We negotiate to make the family accept the unacceptable. Sometimes it may take three days, but we negotiate, and I use the knowledge of their culture,” she says.

Over years of working through outbreaks, Anoko has built deep trust with local communities, bridging the gap between public health science and traditional cultural values to make safety protocols acceptable. Even with this progress, the work of containing the outbreak remains far from over. Misinformation still circulates, and for families like Makumbu’s, the pain of loss is far from over—with more loved ones still fighting for survival in treatment centres. As he finishes covering his mother’s grave, Makumbu leaves with a stark warning for the world: Ebola is real, and it continues to tear through communities in Ituri, leaving few families untouched.

In the conflict-stricken eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, a glimmer of hope has emerged amid a rapidly spreading Ebola crisis: a 16-month-old infant and his mother have successfully overcome the deadly virus and been discharged from a local treatment center. The pair left the Rwampara Treatment Center near Bunia, the capital of Ituri province — the current epicenter of the outbreak — on Tuesday, alongside five other patients who also achieved full recovery from Ebola.

For Kahindo Mireille Pierrette, the mother of the recovering infant, the relief and joy of her child’s survival are overwhelming. “The joy is immense given the state he was in at first,” she shared. “If you had seen him before, you wouldn’t believe he could have this strength now.” Pierrette explained that she rushed her son to the treatment center in late May, after he developed frightening Ebola symptoms: uncontrollable bleeding from the mouth and nose, and extreme weakness that left him barely able to move. Dr. Modet Camara, a clinical lead at the treatment facility, confirmed that the infant received a positive Ebola result via PCR testing on his second day of admission, and was immediately placed on targeted supportive care including antibiotics to manage secondary infections.

As of Tuesday, Congo’s Ministry of Health has confirmed 837 Ebola cases and 196 confirmed deaths since the outbreak was formally declared on May 15. However, public health officials warn the true case count is almost certainly higher, because the virus began spreading undetected for weeks before official confirmation was announced. To date, only 49 patients across the affected region have recovered from the virus, according to government data.

What makes this outbreak particularly challenging for response teams is that it is driven by the rare Bundibugyo Ebola strain, a variant for which no approved vaccines or specific antiviral treatments currently exist. This marks a departure from Congo’s 16 previous Ebola outbreaks, which were overwhelmingly caused by the more common Zaire strain — a variant for which an effective, approved vaccine is already available.

More than 90% of all current cases are concentrated in Ituri province, though infections have also been documented in neighboring North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, and the virus has already crossed the international border into Uganda. Speaking during a virtual meeting of African heads of state on Tuesday, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention Director-General Jean Kaseya issued a stark warning about the outbreak’s trajectory: if spread is not rapidly contained, it could surpass the 2014–2016 West African outbreak to become the deadliest Ebola event on record. Kaseya highlighted that tens of thousands of close contacts of confirmed Ebola patients have not yet been traced and monitored, creating a large pool for potential further transmission.

The 2014 West African outbreak remains the worst Ebola event in recorded history, with more than 28,000 confirmed cases and over 11,000 reported deaths across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

Multiple structural challenges are hampering containment efforts in eastern Congo. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that years of ongoing armed conflict have displaced nearly one million people across Ituri province. As communities flee persistent attacks and move frequently through the region’s vast, dense forest landscape, which is crisscrossed by poor roads and dotted with remote villages that can take days to reach, contact tracing teams struggle to track exposed individuals and limit new transmissions. Additional complications come from the region’s large population of artisanal miners, who regularly move between remote mining sites in the mineral-rich province, making consistent monitoring of potential exposures nearly impossible. Local cultural preferences for traditional healers over formal hospital care have also slowed response efforts, as many infected people delay seeking treatment and continue to interact with their communities while contagious.

A violent attack on an Ebola treatment facility in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has triggered an urgent search operation for a 6-year-old confirmed Ebola patient and her mother, who were abducted from the hospital by armed men armed with knives, local health authorities have confirmed.

According to a formal statement released by Dr. Lubambo Maboko Gaston, a senior local health official, the pair were taken from Wanamahika Hospital in the conflict-affected city of Butembo by what he described as a group of ‘very angry’ assailants. It remains unclear whether the attackers had any prior personal connection to the child or her family, but the incident fits a dangerous pattern of rising violence against Ebola response infrastructure that has plagued the current outbreak.

Deep-seated suspicion and misinformation around Ebola treatment efforts have created a volatile environment for medical responders across the affected region. In a conversation with Reuters, Dr. Gaston issued an urgent appeal to the abducted pair to voluntarily turn themselves in at a formal health facility, warning that delayed care would not only put their own health at severe risk of worsening outcomes but also threaten the health of their family and community by enabling further virus transmission.

This attack is not an isolated event. During the current outbreak, Ebola treatment centers have been targeted repeatedly by community members distrustful of medical efforts. Official counts from response teams have already confirmed 840 total cases and nearly 200 deaths from the virus to date.

Just last month, tensions boiled over in two separate communities. In Mongbwalu, local police were forced to fire warning shots into the air to disperse an angry crowd that attempted to forcibly retrieve the bodies of Ebola victims from a local health facility. Just a few days before that incident, residents of Rwampara — a town located 85 kilometers southeast of Mongbwalu — set fire to hospital isolation tents after authorities blocked them from collecting the body of a man who had died from suspected Ebola.

Health experts emphasize that the bodies of people who die from Ebola carry an extremely high viral load, making them far more infectious than living patients in most cases. Unregulated contact and traditional burial preparations with infected remains are one of the most common drivers of new Ebola clusters, making these forced retrievals an especially major public health threat.

Local leaders say much of the unrest stems from widespread misinformation that has spread through rural and remote parts of the affected provinces. ‘People are not properly informed or sensitised about what is happening. For a certain segment of the population, especially in remote areas, Ebola is an invention by outsiders – it does not exist,’ local politician Luc Malembe Malembe explained to the BBC in an interview last month. ‘They believe it is the NGOs and hospitals creating this to make money, and this is tragic.’

Complicating response efforts further, the current outbreak is caused by Bundibugyo, a rare strain of Ebola that has no licensed vaccine currently available for use. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has confirmed that it will take months of development and testing before a specific vaccine for this strain is ready for widespread deployment.

The abduction took place on Monday in North Kivu, one of three eastern DRC provinces currently at the center of the outbreak, alongside Ituri and South Kivu. Ituri province remains the epicenter of ongoing transmission. The WHO has repeatedly warned that ongoing armed conflict in the region is a major barrier to containing the spread of the virus. The M23 rebel group currently occupies large swathes of both North and South Kivu, leaving vast areas inaccessible to medical response teams.

More coverage of the DRC Ebola outbreak and other news from across the African continent is available at BBCAfrica.com, and audiences can follow BBC Africa’s reporting on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.