Ebola in the DRC exceeds 3,800 deaths and is approaching 8,000 cases

Segundo o Instituto Nacional de Saúde Pública (INSP), were counted to date 7,946 confirmed infections, including 56 in the last 24 hours, during which 34 more people died.

The accumulated lethality rate is 48.2%, according to that organism's latest report.

Currently, 848 patients are hospitalized or in isolation and 2,001 have recovered from the disease, while the follow-up rate of confirmed case contacts is 79.2% and has decreased in recent days.

The province of Ituri remains the epicenter of the epidemic, concentrating 76.4% of all confirmed cases and 62.5% of infections recorded in the last 24 hours.

In addition to Ituri, the epidemic hit the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Tshopo, Upper Uélé, Lower Uélé and South Ubangi.

The authorities warned of the difficulties in receiving new patients in Ituri due to the “limited capacity” that exists, indicating that health centers for hospitalization of suspected cases are already “saturated”.

The current epidemic is the most deadly in the history of DRCongo, surpassing that of 2018-2020, and projections indicate that it can overcome the epidemic that occurred between 2014 and 2016 in West Africa.

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), this epidemic caused 11,325 deaths, among 28,616 cases identified in Guinea-Conakry, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

DRCongo, which in December 2025 declared the end of another Ebola epidemic in the Kasai region, has registered more than a dozen outbreaks since the virus was identified in 1976.

In that year, one of the outbreaks occurred in the Congolese town of Yambuku, near the river Ebola, which named the disease.

Ebola virus is transmitted by direct contact with body fluids from infected people or animals and causes severe haemorrhagic fever, vomiting, diarrhoea and internal bleeding.