The Ebola death toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo climbed to 1,309 as of July 25, 2026, a rise of more than 40 percent in five days, according to DRC government figures cited by Al Jazeera. Total confirmed cases, including deaths, reached 2,973 as of Thursday, a 27 percent increase from the previous Saturday's report. The DRC Ministry of Health officially declared the outbreak — the country's 17th Ebola virus epidemic — on May 14, 2026, after the national biomedical research institute, INRB, confirmed 8 positive cases out of 13 blood samples tested in the health zones of Rwampara, Mongwalu, and Bunia in Ituri province.

Ituri, in the country's northeast, remains the epicentre. The trajectory has been unprecedented in the documented history of Ebola. The 2013–2016 West Africa outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people out of at least 28,000 cases, took roughly eight months to reach 1,000 deaths. The 2026 DRC epidemic crossed that threshold in under 10 weeks, making it the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak ever recorded.

The virus responsible is Bundibugyo ebolavirus, the rarest of the four Ebola species known to infect humans. No approved vaccines or treatments exist for it. Abdulsalami Nasidi, a public health consultant who helped establish the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), told Al Jazeera the virus was "spreading like a wildfire" due to the absence of a proven vaccine. The ring vaccination strategies that proved decisive against Zaire ebolavirus in prior DRC outbreaks — a method that vaccinates people in a ring around each confirmed case to stop the chain of transmission — have no equivalent here.

On July 24, 2026, the University of Oxford's Oxford Vaccine Group announced that the first volunteer had been dosed in the world's first Bundibugyo ebolavirus vaccine trial. Katrina Pollock serves as chief investigator of the Oxford team conducting the trial. The Phase I study — the earliest stage of human testing, focused on safety and immune response — will generate the first human immunogenicity and safety data for a Bundibugyo-specific candidate. But any deployment-ready vaccine remains months or more away at best.

The outbreak's toll on front-line responders is severe. More than 100 health workers had been infected since the outbreak was declared, and around 35 had died as of July 25. Compounding the crisis, health workers at several medical facilities in Ituri province went on strike over unpaid wages and unsafe working conditions. In May, angry residents set ablaze parts of the Ebola treatment centre at Rwampara General Hospital near Bunia, reflecting the community mistrust that has historically undermined outbreak response in the region.

The geographic scope has widened. RFI reported on July 25 that Uganda announced its first death in the current outbreak. Africa CDC's situational report dated July 13 recorded 2,031 confirmed cases and 756 deaths across DRC and Uganda combined; by July 17, those figures had risen to 2,287 confirmed cases and 895 deaths. The DRC government's July 25 data, covering DRC alone, shows the national caseload has since surpassed those combined continental totals.

WHO and Africa CDC jointly declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency. Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya warned on X that if the outbreak is not stopped, it will become the worst the world has documented. On May 23, the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan established a strengthened regional coordination framework in Kampala. The DRC Minister of Health visited the Elikya Ebola treatment centre in Ituri on June 19 to evaluate patient care. The DRC Ministry of Health continues to publish epidemiological surveillance bulletins at its official portal, and WHO's Africa regional office maintains a dedicated outbreak page.

The broader context here is a collision between a pathogen with no medical countermeasures and a response infrastructure under severe strain. The 2018–2020 DRC Ebola outbreak, caused by the Zaire species, was contained with an rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine that had regulatory approval and stockpiles. The Bundibugyo outbreak offers no such tool. The Oxford trial is a necessary first step, but the gap between first-in-human dosing and any emergency-use authorization is measured in many months even under accelerated pathways. In the interim, containment rests entirely on case identification, contact tracing, isolation, and safe burial practices — the classical public health toolkit — in a setting where health workers are striking, treatment centres have been attacked, and community confidence is fragile. The caseload doubling time implied by the recent data trajectory, if sustained, would put the outbreak on a steeper curve than West Africa at a comparable stage. Kaseya's warning that this could become the worst outbreak ever documented is not hyperbole when measured against the current growth rate and the absence of a vaccine.