The latest outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus has claimed 1,000 lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), after the country reported the fastest outbreak of the virus ever recorded, officials said.
At a health conference in Ghana yesterday, the Director General of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Jean Kaseya, noted that the country has so far recorded 1,031 deaths since a new strain of the virus, Bundibugyo, was first detected in patients in May 2027.
In an emotionally charged speech, Dr Kaseya said, “People are dying because we are helpless and because we don’t have the vaccines, we don’t have proper medicine, and we don’t have funding for research.”
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), two people have also died from the same virus strain in Uganda. DRC’s health ministry said that as of Monday, approximately 2,473 cases had been confirmed in the latest outbreak.
Ebola spreads via close physical contact and exposure to infected bodily fluids. As many as 737 patients are currently in isolation or hospitalised, the ministry added. The outbreak in the DRC was declared on May 15 this year after several dozen cases were recorded in the north-eastern province of Ituri.
Since then, the death toll has risen faster than in any previous Ebola outbreak on record, including the 2013–2016 epidemic, which was the largest and deadliest in history, with more than 11,000 deaths out of at least 28,000 cases, primarily in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
While the initial phase of the 2013–2016 outbreak took nearly eight months to reach 1,000 deaths, the latest strain has achieved the same fatality milestone in just 10 weeks.
“The Ebola outbreak is escalating at an alarming pace. We must act now,” Kaseya wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. “If we do not stop it today, this will become the worst outbreak the world has ever documented.”
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