The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned on Thursday that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is still spreading, with the national authorities having recorded over 5,200 confirmed cases and almost 2,500 deaths by Tuesday. Ituri Province in eastern DR Congo remains the epicenter of the outbreak, with Bas-Uélé now becoming the sixth affected province. This is now the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, and it is spreading faster than any previous outbreak.
Also on Thursday, Julien Harneis, the UN Senior Ebola Coordinator, said that the government and aid agencies are scaling up their response by focusing on five key areas: tripling safe care capacity, strengthening community engagement, doubling the number of safe and dignified burial teams, expanding disease surveillance and providing increased support to the most vulnerable.
On Tuesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the epidemic has spread rapidly and that the risk of further national and international expansion remains high.
“The outbreak had a big head start, it is still way ahead of us, and we are playing catch-up,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists.
“We must be frank: the epidemic is far from being under control. It had a big head start, and we are still playing catch-up.”
Ghebreyesus said that what concerns him most is “where people are dying: at home, in their communities, outside treatment centers, and outside known contact lists. “
“Every death like that points to a chain of transmission we have not yet found. Until every chain is found and broken, the epidemic will continue,” he added.
This statement follows warnings from UN relief chief Tom Fletcher last week that the Ebola outbreak in the DRC is outpacing the response.
"Ebola is winning in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We cannot let the virus outrun our response," said Fletcher, who is also the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator. He noted that the epidemic is “killing someone every 30 minutes”.
The Emergency Relief Coordinator allocated an additional US$30.5 million from the UN's Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), which adds to the previous $24 million allocated to the DRC and four neighboring countries to tackle the outbreak.
On Thursday morning, the Congolese government launched the 'Congo River Without Ebola' initiative as part of the broader response efforts. The initiative aims to strengthen disease surveillance and preparedness along the Congo River, which is a major route connecting communities, markets and several provinces.
With CERF funding, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), WHO, UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP) will support the initiative alongside national authorities.
OCHA said they will strengthen disease surveillance at priority ports and transit points, improve early warning and referral systems, and reinforce preparedness among riverine communities and people travelling by boat.
Today, WHO announced that 70,000 doses of the Ebola Zaire vaccine Ervebo have been allocated to DR Congo. Around 50,000 of these doses will support front-line health workers. The allocation also includes 20,000 doses for a Phase 3 clinical trial, which will assess the vaccine's effectiveness against the Bundibugyo virus.
Currently, there is no vaccine or specific treatment for the Bundibugyo species, though work is ongoing to test promising candidates. While it is not yet known whether Ervebo may protect humans against the Bundibugyo virus, early laboratory and animal data suggest that it may offer some degree of protection.
The highly contagious Bundibugyo virus is less well-known than other strains. However, it killed around 30 percent of infected people during previous outbreaks in Uganda (2007) and the DRC (2012). The disease typically begins with flu-like symptoms, including fever, which can mask its true identity before progressing to severe bleeding and other signs of full-blown illness.
The emergency response against the virus continues to be marred by violence. On Monday, an Ebola response team was attacked in the town of Aru in northern Ituri province. According to humanitarian organizations, three ambulances were vandalized, and an ambulance driver was injured during an incident linked to the transfer of a suspected Ebola patient.
This attack occurred as humanitarian and health workers were intensifying their efforts to ramp up the Ebola response amid increasingly challenging conditions. Insecurity continues to affect civilians and humanitarian operations across the province.
As the outbreak gets worse, food assistance is also being stepped up to support patients and communities affected by Ebola.
On Wednesday, WFP expanded its hot meal program to include additional Ebola treatment centers in Ituri and other provinces. Since the end of May, the UN agency has provided over 260,000 hot meals at treatment and isolation centers in the eastern provinces of Ituri, North Kivu, and South Kivu.
OCHA emphasized that this assistance is particularly important given that 2.6 million people are facing acute food insecurity at crisis level or worse across Ebola-affected areas in eastern DRC, meaning that families are experiencing high levels of acute malnutrition. More than half of these families are in Ituri province.
However, the level of response is far outpaced by the scale of the need. To date, only 25 per cent of funding has been secured for the food security sector, so urgent additional funding is needed to ensure life-saving food aid reaches those who need it most.
The DRC government declared an outbreak of Ebola virus disease on May 15, which was later confirmed to be caused by the Bundibugyo strain. This is now the largest Ebola outbreak ever reported in DRC. If the current pace continues, it will surpass the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014–16, which killed over 11,000 people, and become the largest known ever recorded.
Against a backdrop of escalating violence and mass displacement in eastern Congo, the health emergency is worsening, putting civilians at further risk and complicating efforts to contain the disease. It comes amid an already severe humanitarian crisis — one of the world's longest-running and most neglected.
This year, nearly 15 million people in the DRC require humanitarian assistance. More than half of the country's displaced population — 3.4 million people — live in areas affected by the outbreak, further exacerbating the situation.
The eastern provinces, particularly Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu, have experienced decades of violence as non-state armed groups compete for control of the region's natural resources. Escalating hostilities continue to spread across the eastern part of DRC, triggering heightened protection risks for civilians.
Millions of people have been displaced, losing their homes, farmland, livestock and income. Meanwhile, persistently high food prices, disrupted supply chains and frequent disease outbreaks, such as cholera, measles and mpox, are pushing vulnerable communities closer to collapse.
Due to ongoing conflict in the eastern provinces, the country is facing one of the world's largest and most severe hunger crises. According to the most recent data from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), over 26.5 million people — nearly one-quarter of the Congolese population — are currently unable to meet their basic food needs.
The latest IPC update revealed that over 3.6 million children, women and men are experiencing emergency-level food insecurity (IPC Phase 4), indicating critical food shortages that endanger their survival without immediate humanitarian assistance. This is one of the largest current numbers of people facing Phase 4 conditions globally