Overview
- The outbreak has spread beyond Ituri into Haut-Uélé, bringing the crisis across roughly 15 million people in northeastern DRC and into neighbouring Uganda.
- Ituri (Bunia) remains the epicenter with the largest concentration of reported cases and deaths, and officials and experts say official counts are likely underestimates.
- The World Health Organization has issued an international alert and plans to start clinical trials of candidate vaccines and treatments for the Bundibugyo virus that currently lacks approved countermeasures.
- Treatment centres are overwhelmed, with occupancy above reported capacity and dozens of health workers infected or killed, leaving care and isolation capacity severely strained.
- Violence, remote terrain, gold-driven transit routes and strong community resistance to safe-burial rules are complicating contact tracing and containment and raise the risk that the outbreak could last many months.