Ebola is spreading faster than response teams can track it in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where health workers have managed to contact barely one in five contacts they have identified during the day.
Bloomberg writes about this.
On May 21, the Ministry of Health of the Democratic Republic of the Congo reported 83 confirmed cases, 746 suspected cases, and 1 603 identified contacts.
However, on May 22, the agency said that health workers had been able to diagnose only 342 contacts that day — about 21% of the total number of people under surveillance.
The figures suggest that the response is lagging behind the outbreak, even as governments and international organizations step up emergency measures. The outbreak has now spread to three provinces. Two cases were confirmed in neighboring Uganda earlier this week.
Health officials are now trying to track down thousands of people who may have been infected as the infection spread through remote mining areas and urban centers with populations exceeding 700 000.
On May 22, the World Health Organization declared the risk of the disease spreading in the DRC as “very high” and in neighboring Uganda as “high”. Uganda has tightened border controls and suspended passenger transport from the Congo.
Rwanda has also stepped up screening measures and said it will deny entry to most foreign travelers who have recently visited the DRC, and returning residents will face mandatory quarantine.
The outbreak is unfolding in one of the worldʼs most volatile regions, where armed groups control large swaths of territory, roads are poor and millions of people are displaced between mining camps, cities and neighboring countries.
The alliance, which includes the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels, announced on Friday the creation of its own Ebola response structure in the territory it controls and urged communities to cooperate with health workers and avoid politicizing the outbreak.
Ebola outbreak in DR Congo
The first human case of Ebola virus disease was reported in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976. The mortality rate during the first outbreaks was as high as 90%. Thanks to the advent of the Ebola-Zaire strain vaccine, this figure has been reduced to almost 40%.
The largest outbreak of Ebola virus in terms of the number of infected people occurred in West Africa from 2014 to 2016. The number of victims exceeded 11 thousand. In 2014, Time magazine named the fighters against Ebola "Person of the Year".
On May 17, 2026, the WHO reported a new outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda (at that time, 80 deaths were reported, and on May 19, local authorities reported that 131 people had died). The organization called the epidemic of the fever a public health emergency of international concern. The reason is that there is no vaccine for this strain — Ebola-Bundibugyo.
At the same time, WHO advised countries neighboring the DR Congo to activate their national disaster and emergency management mechanisms, as well as conduct screening at borders and main internal roads.
The current outbreak is the 17th in the history of DR Congo. All previous ones, except one, were caused by the Zaire strain.
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