The authorities of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have reported that the Ebola outbreak declared in mid-May in the east of the country has already surpassed the barrier of 3,000 deaths and is approaching 6,200 confirmed infections in the six provinces affected by the epidemic.
In its latest bulletin, the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) has indicated that so far 6,186 infections have been recorded, of which 3,007 have ended in death. It has also specified that in the last 24 hours, 86 diagnoses and 43 additional deaths have been reported, most of them in the province of Ituri, identified as the epicenter of the outbreak.
The agency has clarified that, among the new positives, 49 are located in Ituri, while 32 have been detected in North Kivu and five in Haut-Uele. In addition, it has updated the number of people discharged after overcoming the disease to 1,409, with a fatality rate of 48.6% and an 88% success rate in tracking close contacts.
Similarly, the INSP has emphasized that six provinces -- Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, Tshopo, Haut-Uele, and Bas-Uele -- have been hit by the outbreak, in a context of growing international alerts about the spread of the virus and the risk of it completely overwhelming the response capacity of health authorities.
In this scenario, the Government of the United Kingdom announced on Tuesday an additional package of £50 million (around €58.3 million) to strengthen containment efforts, bringing the total funds committed by London to £78 million (around €91 million) to date.
The Secretary of State for Africa, Kirsty McNeill, stated that "families across the DRC are suffering unimaginable losses as Ebola ravages communities, claiming lives and leaving thousands more struggling to survive," according to a statement released by the British government.
"We know that speed saves lives, which is why we were among the first to commit support and experts to the region. As the outbreak intensifies, we are accelerating our response to keep pace with the speed and scale of the challenge," she pointed out.
The current outbreak in the DRC has already become the deadliest recorded in the country, surpassing that declared between 2018 and 2020. Projections indicate that it could even exceed that of West Africa between 2014 and 2016, which left 28,616 cases and 11,325 deaths in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, according to statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO).
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 emergencies since the pathogen was identified in 1976 in a double outbreak, one of whose foci was located in the Congolese locality of Yambuku, on the banks of the Ebola River, which ultimately gave the disease its name.