The authorities of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have reported that the latest Ebola outbreak, declared in mid-May and focused in the eastern region of the country, has already surpassed 5,500 confirmed infections, becoming the deadliest episode recorded so far in the African country.
The National Institute of Public Health (INSP) details in its most recent bulletin that 5,514 infections have been confirmed, with 2,642 deaths and a fatality rate of 47.9%, while the number of people who have managed to overcome the disease stands at 1,200, with 808 patients still in isolation and a contact tracing rate of 83.4%.
In the last 24 hours, 55 new positives have been reported in the provinces of Ituri, North Kivu, and Haut-Uele, with 35, 16, and four cases, respectively. During the same period, 18 medical discharges and thirteen additional deaths have been recorded, of which ten correspond to Ituri, the region most affected by the epidemic, and to North Kivu.
The health agency specifies that Ituri accounts for 83.6% of the total confirmed infections since the outbreak began, which has already affected 57 of the 151 health zones in the provinces where cases have been detected. Specifically, Ituri adds 4,607 infections and 2,065 deaths, figures much higher than those of North Kivu, which accumulates 714 cases and 490 deaths.
The senior United Nations coordinator for the response to Ebola, Julien Harneis, warned on Saturday from the DRC that the spread continues at an exponential rate and called for an urgent increase in international aid to prevent the response system from being overwhelmed. "We only have funding for the next few weeks, and it will run out very soon," he emphasized.
The outbreak surpassed last week's recorded one between 2018 and 2020 and has become the deadliest in the country's history, with projections indicating that it could even surpass that of West Africa between 2014 and 2016, which left 28,616 infections and 11,325 deaths in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The accumulated data since the beginning of the crisis places this outbreak as the fastest-expanding one on record: in the 2014-2016 epidemic, it took five months to reach the threshold of a thousand deaths, while now more than 2,000 deaths have been surpassed in less than three months, highlighting the magnitude of the health emergency.
The DRC, which in December 2025 declared another outbreak in the Kasai region concluded, is considered the country with the most global experience in managing the Ebola virus, having faced more than a dozen episodes since the pathogen was identified in 1976 in a double outbreak whose epicenter was located in the Congolese town of Yambuku, on the banks of the Ebola River, which gave its name to the disease.