In a high-stakes announcement made on Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) has formally designated the ongoing Ebola outbreak driven by the rare Bundibugyo strain in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), marking one of the most urgent global health alerts in recent years. This declaration comes as the outbreak, which has no licensed vaccine or targeted treatment, has already claimed more than 80 lives and crossed international borders, triggering widespread alarm among public health officials.
The confirmation of an infected case in Goma, a major eastern DRC city located in territory controlled by the Rwanda-backed M23 militia, amplified fears of wider uncontrolled spread on Sunday. According to preliminary data released Saturday by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the outbreak has so far been linked to 88 recorded deaths and 336 suspected cases of the deadly, highly contagious haemorrhagic fever.
Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director of the Congolese National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB), confirmed the Goma case in a statement to AFP, explaining that the patient is the widow of an Ebola victim who died in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province. The woman had already contracted the virus when she traveled from Bunia to Goma following her husband’s death, he said.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus voiced deep concern over the accelerating spread of the outbreak in his official announcement posted to the social platform X. While formally classifying the event as a PHEIC, the WHO’s second-highest alert level under international health regulations (IHR) — with a full pandemic designation reserved as the highest level — Ghebreyesus noted that the outbreak does not yet meet the formal criteria for a pandemic under existing global health rules.
The WHO emphasized that the full scope of the outbreak remains shrouded in uncertainty. “There are significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread,” the global health body stated in its official briefing.
Medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has already begun mobilizing for a large-scale emergency response, with officials describing the outbreak’s rapid growth as “extremely concerning.” DR Congo’s Health Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba highlighted a critical gap in medical tools to fight the outbreak: “The Bundibugyo strain has no vaccine, no specific treatment,” he said, adding that the strain carries an exceptionally high fatality rate that can reach 50 percent.
First identified in 2007, the Bundibugyo strain has already caused a death outside DR Congo’s borders: officials confirmed Saturday that a Congolese national has died of the disease in neighboring Uganda. Currently, licensed Ebola vaccines only exist for the more well-known Zaire strain, which was first documented in 1976 and carries an even higher fatality rate of 60 to 90 percent.
The outbreak was first officially confirmed in Ituri province, a northeastern region of DR Congo that borders Uganda and South Sudan, on Friday, though local residents report deaths from unexplained illness stretching back two weeks. “We’ve been seeing people die for the past two weeks,” Isaac Nyakulinda, a local civil society representative, told AFP via phone. “There is nowhere to isolate the sick. They are dying at home and their bodies are being handled by their family members.”
According to DR Congo’s health minister, the index case, or patient zero, was a nurse who first presented Ebola-like symptoms at a Bunia health facility on April 24. Common symptoms of the viral disease include fever, internal and external bleeding, and vomiting.
Trish Newport, MSF’s Emergency Programme Manager, who is coordinating the group’s deployment of medical and support staff to the affected region, echoed widespread alarm. “The number of cases and deaths we are seeing in such a short timeframe, combined with the spread across several health zones and now across the border, is extremely concerning,” she said.
Adding to response challenges, DR Congo — a nation of more than 100 million people with a land mass four times the size of France — suffers from severely underdeveloped transport and communications infrastructure, making large-scale movement of critical medical equipment a major obstacle.
This outbreak marks the 17th Ebola event to hit DR Congo, and public health officials have repeatedly warned the risk of further geographic spread is very high. Since most cases are concentrated in hard-to-reach conflict-affected areas, only a small fraction of suspected infections have been tested in certified laboratories. Still, the WHO notes that the high positivity rate of tested samples, the spread to two separate countries, and growing reports of new suspected cases “all point towards a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected and reported, with significant local and regional risk of spread.”
The previous Ebola outbreak in the region was declared eradicated in December last year, after killing at least 34 people between August and December 2023. Over the past 50 years, Ebola has killed roughly 15,000 people across Africa, even amid major advances in vaccine development and treatment. The 2018 to 2020 Ebola outbreak in eastern DR Congo remains the deadliest on record for the country, killing nearly 2,300 people.
Believed to originate in bat populations, Ebola causes severe bleeding and organ failure in infected patients. Across all past outbreaks, the overall mortality rate ranges between 25 percent and 90 percent, per WHO data. The virus spreads between humans through contact with bodily fluids or infected blood, with patients only becoming contagious after they develop symptoms. The incubation period for Ebola can last up to 21 days, allowing undetected spread before symptoms appear.