Overview
- Government data released Wednesday, Sept 2 showed 6,186 confirmed cases and 3,007 laboratory‑confirmed deaths, making this the deadliest Ebola epidemic in DRC history and the second‑largest in Africa.
- Genetic and field analyses identify the cause as the rare Bundibugyo ebolavirus, a strain for which no licensed vaccine or treatment exists and whose true size may be larger than reported because many infections occur outside known contact lists.
- Health teams have begun emergency use of the Ervebo vaccine for frontline workers and launched vaccine and treatment trials with efficacy testing planned for October or November, but results will take months to show whether any candidate works against Bundibugyo.
- Response operations are being undermined by armed attacks on health workers, strikes by unpaid staff, high population movement and poor access to communities, which together hamper contact tracing, safe burials and bed capacity expansion.
- WHO Director‑General Tedros warned that unless every chain of transmission is found and broken the epidemic will continue to threaten the DRC and its neighbors and called for urgent international funding and an operational scale‑up.