The director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared this Sunday that the outbreak of the Ebola disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is a public health emergency of international concern, after registering more than 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths.
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The WHO said a laboratory-confirmed case has also been reported in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, which is about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the epicenter of the outbreak in the eastern province of Ituri, suggesting possible wider spread. He noted that the patient had visited Ituri and that other suspected cases have also been reported in the province of North Kivu, which is one of the most populated in Congo and borders Ituri.
Ebola is highly contagious and can be contracted through bodily fluids such as vomit, blood or semen. The disease it causes is rare, but serious and often fatal.
It is a rare and difficult to treat variant of Ebola
Health authorities have confirmed that the current outbreak, first confirmed on Friday, is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, a rare variant of the Ebola disease for which there are no approved treatments or vaccines. Although there have been more than 20 Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, this is only the third time the Bundibugyo virus has been detected.
The WHO indicated that all the cases are concentrated in the Congo except two, which were reported in neighboring Uganda.
Bundibugyo virus was first detected in the Bundibugyo district of Uganda during an outbreak in 2007 and 2008, in which 149 people were infected and 37 died. The second time was in 2012, in an outbreak in Isiro, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 57 cases and 29 deaths were reported.
The objective of the emergency declaration by the WHO is to prompt donor agencies and countries to act. However, the global response to previous statements has been mixed.
In 2024, when the WHO declared monkeypox outbreaks in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa a global emergency, some experts said at the time it did little to get various supplies — including diagnostic tests, medicines and vaccines — quickly to affected countries.
Conflict, migration complicate efforts to track outbreak
The director-general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Jean Kaseya, said Saturday that there are still a high number of active cases in the community, particularly in Mongwalu, where the first cases were reported, “significantly complicating containment and contact tracing efforts.”
Violent conflict with militants – some of them backed by the Islamic State group – as well as constant population movement due to mining, both within the Congo and across the border with Uganda, have also posed a major challenge to response efforts.
Authorities first reported on Friday the spread of the disease in the eastern Congolese province of Ituri, close to Uganda and South Sudan. On Saturday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 336 suspected cases and 87 deaths in Congo.
“There are significant uncertainties about the actual number of infected people and the geographic spread related to this event at the current time. In addition, there is limited understanding of the epidemiological links with known or suspected cases,” Tedros said.
The two cases in Uganda include one person who the country said had traveled from the Congo and died in a hospital in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, and another who the WHO said had also traveled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The WHO indicated that the high percentage of positive cases among the samples analyzed, the spread to Kampala and Uganda, and the clusters of deaths in Ituri “point to a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected and reported, with a significant risk of local and regional spread.”
The outbreak in Congo left 50 dead before being detected
Kaseya said slow detection delayed the response and gave the outbreak time to spread.
“This outbreak started in April. So far we don’t know the index case. That means we don’t know the magnitude of this outbreak,” Kaseya explained, using a term to refer to the first detectable case of an epidemic.
The earliest known alleged victim, a 59-year-old man, developed symptoms on April 24 and died in a hospital in Ituri on April 27.
