Four weeks ago eastern Congo’s Ituri province had 95% of the Ebola cases, but now the neighboring province of North Kivu has 40% of the newly reported cases. Stéphanie Hoffmann, coordinator of the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reports, “Multiple outbreaks are developing at the same time, with varying intensity and in different locations. As long as new hotspots continue to emerge while the virus spreads across northern North Kivu, [stopping] the epidemic will remain extremely difficult.” The outbreak has been highly unpredictable, with transmission patterns changing from week to week.
As the outbreak shifts to North Kivu, medical professionals say that there is a lack of specialized medical facilities and trained specialized healthcare providers in the province.
Already in September over 28% of confirmed Ebola patients in North Kivu were not receiving specialized care, a circumstance which only causes higher risk of transmissions from patients to health workers. Hoffmann from MSF said, “For weeks, treatment capacity has been stretched to its limit. Because there are not enough beds available, we are sometimes forced to refer confirmed Ebola patients elsewhere… standards of care in some peripheral facilities do not always meet the requirements for Ebola treatment. This is extremely concerning.”
This current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus, for which there is no approved cure. However, in late June over 300 Ebola patients in Congo volunteered to participate in preclinical trials on two drugs. One drug is Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug obeldesivir for people who may have been exposed to the virus, testing its effectiveness in preventing the disease. The other drug is MappBio’s monoclonal antibody MBP-134 for patients already suffering from the disease. There are two vaccines to prevent the much more common Zaire strain of the Ebola virus, and at least one of these Zaire vaccines is being tested as a possible prevention against the Bundibugyo strain. According to the U.S. CDC, this outbreak in Congo has resulted in over 8,600 confirmed Ebola cases and 4,148 deaths as of early October 2026. On Oct. 6 the government of Kenya announced its first Ebola death from a Kenyan who had traveled in Congo and Uganda and then boarded a commercial airliner and flew to Nairobi, only to die hours later.
