The Democratic Republic of Congo is facing its deadliest ever Ebola outbreak on record.
As of August 19, the country has reported more than 5,000 cases and 2,378 deaths. The outbreak has now surpassed the 2018–2020 Ebola epidemic, which was previously the country's worst, and is spreading faster than health authorities can contain it.
The disease was officially declared on May 15 after laboratory testing confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease in Ituri province. But investigations suggest the virus may have been circulating for months before authorities recognized it.
A Virus That Does Not Have an Approved Vaccine
The Bundibugyo virus is one of six viruses in the Ebola family.
It was first identified in Uganda in 2007 and has since caused outbreaks in both Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Historically, case-fatality rates in Bundibugyo outbreaks have ranged from about 30% to 50%.
This changes the priorities of the frontliners.
Why? Because there is a licensed Ebola vaccine, Ervebo, and approved treatments for Ebola virus disease caused by the Zaire Ebola virus. But those products are not licensed for Bundibugyo virus disease.
WHO says there is currently no licensed vaccine or specific therapy approved for Bundibugyo disease, and there is insufficient evidence to confirm that Ervebo protects against it.
As a result, healthcare teams have had to rely heavily on early diagnosis, isolation, infection prevention, contact tracing, safe burials, and supportive care while researchers evaluate potential vaccines and treatments.
WHO experts have identified several potential treatments, including antiviral drugs and antibody-based therapies, for clinical evaluation. But there is still no perfect cure for this strain of Ebola.
How the Outbreak May Have Started
One of the earliest suspected links is the death of a 44-year-old pastor, Paluku Makundi Denis, on February 3.
Makundi had been diagnosed with peritonitis at a hospital in Bunia. Ebola testing was not carried out because health authorities were not yet aware of an outbreak. His body was then transported to Mongbwalu for burial. During the journey, the wooden coffin cracked.
When the body arrived, relatives transferred it into a new coffin. That meant people came into direct contact with the body of someone who may have been infected with Ebola. More than 80 relatives, friends and neighbors later attended the funeral.
Investigators have not established that Makundi was the first Ebola case. But the funeral is being examined as one of the earliest possible super-spreader events.
Within weeks, a cluster of unexplained illnesses and deaths appeared in the community. Nearly 50 deaths were reported in Mongbwalu within two weeks of the burial, according to local officials cited in a Reuters investigation.
The episode also shows why controlling Ebola depends heavily on safe handling of infected bodies. People who die from Ebola can remain highly infectious, making traditional burial practices particularly risky during an outbreak.
This is just one of the many factors making the outbreak difficult to contain.
3 Tough Reasons Containment Keeps Failing
The virus is spreading in an environment where basic disease-control measures are difficult to maintain.
1. Limited Healthcare Infrastructure: Ituri contains remote and densely populated communities where access to hospitals, laboratories, and other medical services is limited. Testing and surveillance become considerably harder when patients live far from treatment facilities.
2. Warzone Conditions: The outbreak's epicenter is also a warzone. Ituri and North Kivu have seen years of conflict with active rebel groups and ongoing military operations. That makes contact tracing, sample transport, and simply reaching sick patients dangerous and slow. Health workers are navigating armed checkpoints and shifting front lines just to do their jobs, on top of mountainous, forested terrain that already makes movement difficult.
3. Avoidance of Care and Distrust: People are avoiding care. Fear of treatment centers, distrust in institutions, and heavy reliance on traditional healers or informal clinics mean many infected individuals aren't showing up for testing or isolation until it's too late — both for them and for the people around them. This isn't a new pattern in Ebola outbreaks, but it's proving especially costly here given how contagious the virus is through contact with bodily fluids, including at funerals.
What Are the Frontliners Doing Today?
For healthcare professionals, controlling the outbreak involves much more than treating patients.
Doctors and nurses are caring for suspected and confirmed cases. Laboratory teams are testing samples. Epidemiologists and community health workers are tracing contacts. Infection-prevention teams are working to keep hospitals from becoming sources of transmission. Burial teams are handling bodies safely, while community workers are trying to explain the outbreak and counter misinformation.
Each part of that chain matters.
If a patient is diagnosed late, the number of people who may have been exposed increases. If a contact cannot be located, a transmission chain can continue unnoticed, says W.H.O Chief Tedros.
This puts controlling the spread of the disease ahead of treating individual patients. That means containment is the immediate priority for frontline healthcare workers.
What Happens Next
Help is on the way. The United Nations has increased support for the Ebola response, with UN OCHA allocating $54.5 million to accelerate efforts to contain the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
But funding alone will not contain the outbreak.
The immediate challenge remains straightforward: find cases earlier, isolate them faster, and break the chain of transmission before the virus reaches the next community.
The scale of the outbreak has already made that difficult. Thousands of cases have been recorded, transmission has reached multiple provinces, and many infections are occurring outside populations already being monitored by health teams.
But health authorities do not believe containment is impossible. WHO officials have said, “We hope to reverse the fast-moving spread of Ebola within three months.”
The Real Variable
This outbreak isn't just a scary story about a virus.
It's a story about the gap between when a disease starts and when the world notices.
It’s about the health workers trying to close that gap without a cure. Without full access to the areas and people that need them most. And often without the trust of the very communities they're trying to protect.
For now, the numbers are still climbing.
Whether they start to fall depends less on medicine and more on logistics, trust, and access; the same three things that have made this outbreak so hard to contain from the very beginning.