The Democratic Republic of Congo officially declared an Ebola outbreak on September 4 when laboratory results confirmed the presence of the Zaire strain of the virus in patients. This is the 16th outbreak of the deadly Ebola disease in the country. In this latest outbreak there are 15 known deaths and 28 others, who are believed to be infected in the southern Kasai province that borders Angola.
D.R. Congo has deployed a national rapid response team to the Kasai province and the World Health Organization is “deploying experts and medical supplies needed to protect health workers and care for patients,” according to a post on X by WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The country has a stockpile of medications to treat infections and roughly 2,000 doses of the Ervebo Ebola vaccine. D.R. Congo is also facing concurrent outbreaks including Mpox, cholera, and malaria.
The Zaire strain of the Ebola virus has a fatality rate of 50% and has caused two of the worst Ebola outbreaks in Africa. The world’s largest Ebola outbreak swept through the West African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia from 2013 to 2016, where it killed more than 11,300 people. The world’s second largest Ebola outbreak took place in eastern D.R. Congo’s North Kivu province, where 2,200 people died in 2018-2020. Ebola was first discovered in humans in 1976; it is a hemorrhagic fever endemic in animal populations in tropical areas of Africa. The disease can spread from animals to humans or from humans to humans by merely coming into contact with any liquid from an infected host. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, vomiting, and unexplained bleeding.
In previous Ebola outbreaks, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been on the ground and in the labs fighting the disease, but its involvement ended when USAID officially closed its doors on July 2, 2025. Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, told reporters: “USAID has been a backbone of the Ebola response for years. They funded treatment units, infection prevention in clinics, surveillance, and rapid response. And when those resources are pulled back, of course, it’s going to leave fewer tools to be able to identify and contain outbreaks. We need to be able to double down on that investment, not to be walking away from it, because we have to care about what’s happening everywhere around the world. If we’re not preventing disease and stopping spread of disease globally, eventually, certainly it will happen locally.”
