More than 1,000 people have died in the Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to Africa’s top health body, a grim toll in the fastest Ebola outbreak in history, as conflict, community resistance and an uneven response fuel its spread.
Speaking at a health summit in Ghana on Wednesday, Dr Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said 1,031 deaths have been confirmed.
“These are people dying. They are dying because we don’t have vaccines, we don’t have medicine, we don’t have funding,” he added.
The latest update from DR Congo’s Ministry of Health showed that as of Monday, 2,473 cases had been recorded in the latest outbreak. At least 737 patients were in isolation or had been admitted to hospital, it said.
The outbreak, which was declared on May 15, is unlike most previous Ebola outbreaks because the Bundibugyo virus responsible for it has no approved vaccines or treatments.
It has also killed more people at a faster rate than any outbreak on record, including the 2013-2016 outbreak that is considered the worst on record with over 11,000 deaths out of at least 28,000 cases.
That outbreak took about eight months from the first case to reach 1,000 deaths.
Ebola virus outbreak 2026
The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a global health emergency over an outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain that carries a fatality rate up to 40 per cent.
WHO has said the true scale of the outbreak could be two to four times larger than official figures indicate. Some communities at its epicentre also remain difficult to reach, mainly because of fighting involving rebel groups.
Ebola is rare, but highly contagious and can be contracted through contact with bodily fluids such as vomit, blood or semen. It can cause severe illness and is often fatal.
Officials have warned that 80 per cent of new cases have emerged outside known chains of transmission, a sign the outbreak is spreading faster than health officials can track it even as they step up their response in Ituri province, the epicentre of the outbreak, and four other provinces where cases have been recorded.
Community resistance to Ebola teams, particularly those carrying out safe burials, has also hampered the response.
Attacks on health facilities and response teams have also forced frontline workers and aid groups out of some areas. Some health workers have gone on strike, saying they have not been paid since the outbreak started.
The attack highlighted the challenges facing the response in eastern DR Congo.
In Ituri’s Irumu territory, the local military administrator recently described Ebola as a greater threat than Islamic State-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces insurgency and urged residents to support, rather than attack, health workers.
Less than 9 per cent of the contacts of confirmed patients who are expected to be traced are currently being monitored, far below the level needed to contain the outbreak, according to Africa CDC. More than 60 per cent of deaths are occurring in the community before patients can receive care.
Pierre Akilimali, the Ebola response incident manager at the National Public Health Institute of the Democratic Republic of Congo, said the high number of community deaths suggests many infections are not being detected or isolated in time, allowing the virus to continue spreading.
Last month, researchers at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention used computer modelling to estimate how the outbreak could evolve. In a worst-case scenario, they said it could approach the scale of the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic.
