The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared an international public health emergency. The death toll has already reached 90, with hundreds of suspected cases.
A new Ebola outbreak has erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The official death toll has already reached 90 and infections number in the hundreds, but difficulties in collecting data raise fears that the actual figures could be far higher.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said there are not yet grounds to speak of a pandemic, but has declared an international public health emergency. In part because for the species of virus currently circulating, known as Bundibugyo, no vaccine exists, and even the testing systems are unreliable.
The first case of the new Ebola outbreak dates back to 24 April. A healthcare worker in the province of Ituri developed fever, haemorrhaging, vomiting and severe malaise and died within a few days at a medical centre in Bunia. World Health Organization monitoring was only initiated two weeks later, on 5 May, which allowed the virus to spread unchecked. Current figures point to 330 suspected cases, of which only eight have been confirmed by laboratory analysis, and 90 deaths, two of them in Uganda. Several of the confirmed cases belong to healthcare personnel, suggesting that transmission has occurred in hospital facilities.
Ebola is a disease caused by six different viruses discovered from the 1970s onwards and mostly associated with fruit bats. In recent years there have been several outbreaks — no fewer than seventeen in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone — caused mainly by the Zaire virus, which carries a particularly high mortality rate. Other species include Sudan, responsible for nine outbreaks, the most recent in the province of Kasai in 2025, and Tai forest. The species now circulating is a fourth variant called Bundibugyo, which has a mortality rate of up to 50 per cent. Infected humans transmit the disease through bodily fluids such as vomit, blood and semen, and until now it had only happened twice before — in 2007 and in 2012 — that Ebola manifested through the Bundibugyo virus.
The World Health Organization has described an outbreak "potentially far more extensive than what is currently detected and reported, with a significant risk of spread at the local and regional level." It has declared the situation an international public health emergency. This means the outbreak poses a risk not only to the country in which it developed — in this case the Democratic Republic of Congo — but also to other states, given the high risk of transnational spread. The two deaths recorded in Uganda confirm as much.
The area affected by the new Ebola outbreak, the north-eastern province of Ituri, is characterised by conflicts that entail the constant movement of populations and militias towards neighbouring South Sudan and Uganda. This may have facilitated the circulation of the virus and its spread across borders, but security concerns also represent an obstacle to health work on the ground. The fact that the Ebola species involved is Bundibugyo further complicates matters, since the only vaccines developed so far target the Zaire species. The tests used to detect the disease were also developed exclusively for that species, meaning that many infections are likely escaping detection — the only way to identify the Bundibugyo species is by sending samples to the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale in Kinshasa, which takes days if not weeks to process them.
The status of international public health emergency requires the states involved to put in place a series of containment measures, such as halting large public events. The WHO has nonetheless reassured that there is no prospect of the situation escalating into a pandemic, which means, for instance, that no border closures between the affected countries are planned. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the allocation of 500,000 dollars to support the response to the outbreak, while the UN agency's specialist staff are advising the affected countries on how to respond. As warned by Atul Gawande, a former senior official at USAID — the United States agency for international development shut down last year by Donald Trump — cuts to the agency and the United States' withdrawal from the WHO may have contributed to delaying the response to the ongoing Ebola outbreak, facilitating its spread.