Ebola outbreak in DR Congo kills more than 2,000

The latest toll for the disease puts it close behind the country's deadliest Ebola outbreak in 2018 to 2020. [Jospin Mwisha, AFP]

Ebola has killed more than 2,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the latest outbreak, which is nearing the country's deadliest ever.

The current outbreak, which has hit the DRC's conflict-plagued eastern and northeastern regions, was declared on May 15 but is thought to have already been spreading for several weeks.

It is the DRC's 17th surge of the highly contagious disease and is already considered the largest in the country's history "and could well become the largest outbreak ever", Sania Nishtar, chief executive of the Gavi global vaccine alliance, has said.

According to figures released on Tuesday by Congolese health authorities, 2,011 people have died in the latest outbreak, out of 4,381 confirmed cases of the virus.

The latest toll puts it close behind the DRC's deadliest Ebola outbreak in 2018 to 2020 when nearly 2,300 people died out of 3,500 recorded cases.

The surge began in northeastern Ituri province and spread to several other provinces, notably North Kivu, regions where health infrastructure and a state presence are largely lacking.

The case fatality rate of the current outbreak is estimated by Congolese health authorities to be 45.9 percent.

"We haven’t reached the peak yet," Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba said in an interview shared on X by his ministry on Tuesday.

"Within the next three months, we expect to have already brought the spread under control and to start seeing it decline," he added.

Slow response

Insecurity due to the presence of armed groups and mistrust of the local population have hampered the response to the outbreak in the affected regions.

"We are only seeing 30 percent (of infected people), where 70 percent of people are dying at home. This is why this Ebola is different," Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the World Health Organization's regional director for Africa, told reporters in Ituri's provincial capital, Bunia, on Monday.

Congolese virologist Jean-Jacques Muyembe, who helped discover Ebola in 1976, said in an interview with Tuesday's Le Monde newspaper that the response had been "slow and ineffective".