The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has become the deadliest in the country's history, DRC public health officials said Sunday, with 2,325 dead from 4,945 confirmed cases three months after the epidemic was declared.
The toll surpasses the 2,299 deaths recorded in the country's 2018-2020 outbreak and puts the current epidemic on pace to overtake the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak — 11,310 deaths across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — as the largest in the disease's known history. The World Health Organization has called the pace of transmission "exceptional," and no vaccine has been approved for the Bundibugyo strain driving the surge.
Pace and spread
DRC's Institute of Public Health recorded 101 new cases in the previous 24 hours, spread across six of the country's 26 provinces. More than 3,400 cases have been logged in Ituri, the northeastern province where the outbreak was declared May 15, though sequencing indicates transmission began in February. It took the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak nearly five months to reach 1,000 deaths; this outbreak passed 2,000 in less than three.
Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian affairs chief, said Friday that "Ebola is winning in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," warning that "the epidemic is killing someone every 30 minutes."
Response strained
Health workers at a treatment center in Ituri walked off the job recently over three months of unpaid wages, briefly closing the facility. Roughly a million people in the province have been displaced by armed conflict, according to the UN, and the outbreak has spread south into rebel-held areas of North Kivu and South Kivu controlled by the Rwandan-backed M23 group. Humanitarian funding for DRC fell sharply in 2025 after the Trump administration froze foreign-aid programs run through the State Department, the Guardian reported.
Thomas Parisch, a public health specialist deployed to the DRC with Médecins Sans Frontières, told the Guardian that late detection is compounding the death rate. "Instead, we're still seeing many cases detected very late, when treatment is less likely to succeed, with many identified only after they die in the community," he said.
Vaccine gap
No approved vaccine exists for the Bundibugyo species, which has caused only two prior outbreaks, in 2007 and 2012. Britain's medicines regulator has cleared first-in-human trials of an Oxford-developed candidate that uses the same viral-vector technology as the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, and three other Bundibugyo vaccines are in development. The WHO is separately sponsoring a DRC trial of two existing antiviral therapies begun last month in Ituri.
Abdirahman Mahamud, who heads the WHO's emergency response division, has said a coordinated response across the five transmission zones could bring a turnaround in three months, but that under a moderate scenario the outbreak would not peak for six months and could stretch to 12. Neighboring Uganda, where 20 cases were confirmed in Kampala earlier this summer, was declared Ebola-free on July 28.