June 20, 2026. The Ebola virus is accelerating and continuing to spill beyond the borders of Ituri Province in the Congo. According to a World Health Organization press release issued yesterday,
The Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to evolve rapidly, with sustained transmission and increasing numbers of reported cases. As of 17 June, a cumulative total of 896 confirmed cases, including 232 deaths, have been reported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As of 18 June, Uganda has reported 19 confirmed cases including two deaths, as well as one probable case, who subsequently died.
In addition, 75 health care workers have contracted Ebola since the start of the epidemic, and of these, 17 have died. Ebola, so far, has been confined to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda (with the exception of foreign nationals who have been airlifted to Germany and the Czech Republic).
Radio Okapi reported on June 18 that health care in Ituri Province will now be provided free of charge during the current Ebola outbreak in the Congo. The government believes that this will encourage more people to seek care if they know or suspect that they have been infected. This, in turn, will help contain the spread of the disease.
There have been three deaths altogether (one a youth) outside of the Laikipia Air Base in central Kenya. These are not Ebola deaths but rather relate to protests. With the consent of the central government of Kenya, the U.S. has set up a fifty-bed Ebola quarantine facility to manage American citizens, including select others who may contract Ebola. As you might expect, premium care will be available to them. The point was to keep people with Ebola out of the U.S. However, there is likely a historical and cultural tension in the selection of Laikipia County as the site, because this area of the country was known in colonial times as the “White Highlands.” The name was explained by the late-nineteenth-century explorer Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, who wrote:
Here we have a territory admirably suited for a white man’s country, and I can say this with no thought of injustice to any native race, for the country in question is either utterly uninhabited for miles and miles or at most its inhabitants are wandering hunters who have no settled home, or whose fixed habitation is the lands outside the healthy area.
So, it is perfectly understandable why some Kenyans, already on edge over a deadly, contagious disease, are angry that their country is again being used to the benefit of white foreigners and to the exclusion of indigenous Kenyans. On occasion, hundreds of protesters have appeared with signs. The demand of the protesters is clear. They want the facility shut down completely and moved elsewhere, presumably out of the country.
The U.S. position is, in its own way, a mirror image of the protesters’ own logic — neither side wants Ebola patients on its own soil. NIMBY (Not in My Backyard). Even local health clinics in Kenya opposed the American initiative. President of Kenya William Samoei Ruto has been reported as implying that the quarantine facility would serve both Kenyans and Americans, though there is reasonable doubt whether he actually said this. Meanwhile, the American intent was, and is, clear.
June 7, 2026. Armed violence continues in Ituri province with armed guards necessary to secure treatment facilities and protect relief workers, according to Radio Okapi. Shootouts between insurgent groups and pro-government forces continued last week unabated. Border closings continue to raise prices in the stricken areas, with dozens of trucks carrying rotting produce parked on the Congolese side of the border with Uganda. Some people are resorting to the use of several dozen footpaths in the jungle to skirt the border guards.
Churches are limiting the number of people who can attend weddings, and baptisms, ordinations, and confirmations have been rescheduled, according to Africa News. Clinics in Bunia are starting to receive prefabricated “cubes” made of transparent or translucent plastic, in which Ebola patients are confined and health care workers can treat them from outside the cube using special arm and glove inserts. This saves on personal protection gear, which is in short supply.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted late last week that the number of cases in the outbreak might grow to 20,000 or more. As of last Thursday, official numbers show 452 confirmed cases with 82 deaths in total. But this number is almost certainly an undercount, because there are numerous confirmed cases that are unaccounted for.
June 1, 2026. Today’s update provides some background on the emerging health crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We begin with the World Health Organization.
The UN World Health Organization (WHO) last week warned that eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo faces a "catastrophic collision of disease and conflict" as a fast-spreading Ebola outbreak outpaces containment efforts in a region already battered by armed violence, mass displacement, and acute hunger. As of June 1, 2026, the DRC Ministry of Health has reported 282 confirmed cases and more than 1,000 suspected cases under investigation, with Ituri Province accounting for 264 of those confirmed cases. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the Ebola Bundibugyo virus outbreak in Ituri Province was spreading in an environment where insecurity, attacks on health facilities, and population movements were making it "nearly impossible" to trace contacts and isolate cases.
Here I would note the continuing state of armed conflict in the Congo, which has displaced millions of people over the years — more than 500,000 in this area of the Congo since January 2025 alone, with 1.2 million people currently requiring humanitarian assistance in Ituri Province alone. There are increasing calls for a temporary ceasefire, at least until the Ebola outbreak can be extinguished.
Efforts to contain the outbreak are unfolding in one of the most volatile regions of eastern DRC, where humanitarian access has long been constrained by conflict involving multiple armed groups, including the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), CODECO militias, and the Rwanda-backed M23 armed group.
The anti-government M23 group is made up mainly of ethnic Tutsis. The Congolese government is accused of collaborating with Hutu militias. The conflict is partially driven by competition over the region’s extraordinary mineral wealth — gold and rare earth elements — as major world powers compete through their proxies for control of these resources. But in another very real sense, we are witnessing the continuation of the ethnic violence and genocide that killed between 500,000 and 800,000 people during the 1994 Rwandan catastrophe. At this moment, Ituri Province is among the most actively contested in the entire region — and it is also ground zero in the fight against Ebola. Here, the CODECO (Cooperative for the Development of the Congo — originally a peaceful organization, now a militia operating mainly in Ituri Province) has committed massacres and village burnings and displaced tens of thousands of civilians.
Unfortunately, both sides in the conflict have been accused by international humanitarian agencies of murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping. There are no “good guys” in this conflict save for the relief workers who are invariably caught in the middle.
A further complication deserves emphasis: unlike previous major Ebola outbreaks, where ring vaccination with the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine was available as a containment tool, there is currently no licensed vaccine or approved treatment for the Bundibugyo strain specifically. This is only the third detected outbreak involving this particular virus, following outbreaks in Uganda in 2007–2008 and in DRC in 2012. WHO advisory groups have described several candidate treatments and vaccines as promising enough to warrant evaluation in clinical trials, but nothing is approved for use. This significantly complicates the containment picture and distinguishes the current crisis from more recent Ebola responses.
Turning to developments closer to home: U.S. officials said Thursday that the United States was planning to send Americans exposed to Ebola while working abroad to a abroad to a new facility in Kenya for quarantine, rather than flying them back to the United States to recover. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s plans. They said the facility would be located at Laikipia Air Base and would be operational with 50 quarantine beds by Friday. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. government intends to commit $13.5 million toward Kenya’s Ebola preparedness efforts as part of the arrangement.
The plan immediately encountered legal and political resistance. Kenya’s High Court suspended the establishment of the facility and the arrival of any foreign patients pending the hearing of a case filed by the Law Society of Kenya and a constitutional watchdog. Both organizations cited Kenya’s fragile health system as the primary reason why foreign Ebola patients should not be quarantined in the country. It is worth noting that Kenya has not recorded a single Ebola case, though neighboring Uganda has reported nine confirmed cases and has closed its border with the DRC.
Today, June 1, hundreds of youths in Kenya’s central town of Nanyuki demonstrated against the establishment at Laikipia Air Base of an Ebola quarantine center for American citizens exposed to the virus — protests that came even after the High Court had already suspended the plan. Laikipia Governor Joshua Irungu publicly opposed the facility, warning that locals who work inside the air base could be exposed to the virus, and that no public participation had been sought before the agreement was reached. When protesters attempted to enter the base to seek answers, the Kenya Defense Forces intervened. Residents noted that health facilities in Nanyuki lack even basic personal protective equipment for common diseases, let alone the biosafety infrastructure required for Ebola. “Nanyuki town will not serve as a disease dumpsite,” one resident told journalists, vowing that protests would continue until the quarantine facility was shut down.
As the FIFA World Cup approaches — with teams from nearly every nation on earth converging on Canada, the United States, and Mexico — concern and scrutiny are shifting to North America to prevent any Ebola introduction into the Western Hemisphere during or following the event. The CDC has assessed the current risk to the American public as low. Nevertheless, the combination of a rapidly expanding outbreak with no approved vaccine or treatment, a conflict zone that makes contact tracing nearly impossible, and the largest international sporting event in the world on the near horizon, represents precisely the kind of convergent risk that public health officials are paid to lose sleep over.
May 31, 2026. Today, Al Jazeera reports both good news and bad news about the Ebola outbreak. The WHO has announced the recovery of five infected patients in Bunia who are being discharged from treatment facilities there. Unlike the Zaire strain of Ebola, for which approved antiviral treatments exist, the current Bundibugyo variant (named for a district in western Uganda where it first emerged in 2007–2008) has no approved pharmaceutical treatment. Supportive care — including supplemental oxygen, fluid replacement, and cardiac monitoring and laboratory blood work — is the only effective treatment regimen. While it is possible for a person who has contracted and recovered from Ebola to be reinfected, such cases are exceedingly rare.
But Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) called the current situation on the ground 'deeply alarming.' In a statement, Alan Gonzalez, MSF's deputy director of operations, attributes this challenge to the difficulty of quickly and accurately diagnosing the strain. Gonzalez remarked: 'Never before has an Ebola outbreak recorded so many cases so soon after its declaration.'
John Johnson, medical lead for the MSF response to this 17th Ebola outbreak, had a more detailed explanation. He noted:
'The major obstacle in the response to this outbreak is the ability to rapidly diagnose those affected by the disease. PCR tests require virus-specific diagnostic kits. However, these are currently available in insufficient quantities for the Bundibugyo virus, which considerably slows down case confirmation and, as a result, the implementation of contact tracing and patient isolation.
Thus, as medical teams await results day after day, other villagers are being infected, and it may be a week or two before these villagers realize they are ill. At that point, cultural tradition makes them nearly as likely to seek a traditional healer as a medical practitioner.
May 30, 2026. Yesterday (May 29, 2026), the WHO released an update noting the following:
As of 27 May, a total of 906 suspected cases and 223 deaths among suspected cases have been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As of 29 May, a total of 134 confirmed cases, including nine in Uganda, with 18 deaths among the confirmed cases, have been reported across both countries. This is an additional 49 confirmed cases, eight confirmed deaths, 160 suspected cases and 47 suspected deaths since the last update on 21 May.
Ninety percent of the cases at the moment are in Ituri, though an increase in cases in Uganda and Rwanda is reasonably certain to appear.
DRC Minister of Public Health Roger Samuel Kamba tried to project an aura of calm two days ago (May 28) while visiting Bunia in Ituri Province. 'Today, we have 906 suspected cases and approximately 223 suspected deaths. In our treatment centers, we have 105 patients. This is not a number that would lead us to say the epidemic is out of control,' he explained. 'The government remains committed to caring for all Ebola patients currently undergoing treatment in all affected areas,' he stated. He also appealed to the populace to avoid being influenced by or spreading unreliable information from social media. According to him, skepticism and mistrust can lead to dangerous behaviors, such as failure to follow preventive measures or refusal of medical care. Consequently, authorities are calling on citizens to exercise vigilance and discipline by following the recommendations of health teams. Awareness-raising, combating rumors, and adherence to preventive measures are considered key elements in curbing the spread of the epidemic.
Read more on Radio Okapi.
Too little, too late?
I asked Claude to take the number of confirmed cases — either by blood analysis or by presumptive signs and symptoms — over the past two weeks, along with the R value (Reproductive number) of the Bundibugyo virus (BDBV), and asked it to extrapolate a projected curve in the number of cases. Because there are discrepancies in the actual number of cases depending on the reporting authority; because the R value has not been specifically computed for this fairly rare strain of Ebola; keeping in mind that there is no approved treatment and considering the struggle to obtain the population’s cooperation with medical care along with support from western governments in terms of providing much-needed supplies, Claude generated this projection.”
May 29, 2026. The U.S. announced that it will be contributing $80 million to support the Congo’s response to the Ebola outbreak, according to Radio Okapi, the Congo’s largest independent radio station. This will be used for
There is one handwashing station and one infrared thermometer to serve a camp of 10,000 displaced people in Bunia, a city at the heart of the outbreak in eastern Congo. Camp leaders say they tell residents to wash their hands before eating — with soap for the lucky ones who have it. For the rest, the advice is to use ash or sand. "My fear is that we are here with nothing to protect ourselves. We have no protection, no water or soap, and we live near garbage," said Francine Leve-Janguzi, a resident of the so-called ISP camp, speaking to The Associated Press, as she opened an empty tap in a sea of tarpaulin roofs.
The sanitation situation is equally grim outside the camp. According to Radio Okapi, the population of Beni, in North Kivu, is facing a shortage of drinking water, with some neighborhoods receiving no tap water for months while others receive water only once or twice a week. This crisis is hampering efforts to combat the Ebola outbreak which was declared in the DRC on 15 May 2026. This is a major challenge, given that the Beni region is experiencing significant population movement between it and the neighboring province of Ituri, the epicenter of the current Ebola epidemic.
Uganda has reported seven confirmed cases and one death — three linked to travel from DRC. Uganda closed its border with DRC on Wednesday, 27 May, for at least four weeks.
Read more on Radio Okapi.
Feature photo caption: A USAMRIID scientist works in a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). (Photo courtesy of USAMRIID)
As of 27 May 2026, the Democratic Republic of the Congo Ministry of Health has reported 121 confirmed cases including 17 confirmed deaths. Another 1,077 suspected cases including 238 suspected deaths are being tracked across Ituri, North Kivu, and South Kivu provinces. WHO and other international health authorities note that the true number of infections is likely considerably higher than reported suspected cases.
Additional threats are being mentioned, including the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Bunia, whose inhabitants are refugees from armed conflict.
the procurement and distribution of protective equipment for healthcare workers, in collaboration with UNICEF and the World Food Programme border health screening, with support from the International Organization for Migration epidemiological surveillance public awareness campaigns.
Radio Okapi has noted that in spite of the epidemic, it is business-as-usual and very few precautions have been taken this past week in the affected Congolese provinces:
Several churches and schools are ignoring preventive measures against Ebola, despite repeated calls from political authorities for vigilance. This Sunday, May 24, many churches welcomed worshippers in a business-as-usual atmosphere, without social distancing. In several places of worship, the halls were packed, making it difficult to follow preventive guidelines. Another observation: in front of several churches, no handwashing stations were available, contrary to health recommendations. In some elementary schools offering free education, classes have between 60 and 70 students, making it practically impossible to maintain any distance between students. With just a few days left in the school year, many parents are expressing concern about a possible worsening of health risks. Some officials approached declined to comment on this failure to comply with measures, which was also observed in several neighborhoods of Beni, particularly in schools. Radio Okapi was unable to obtain a response from officials in the national education sector in Beni. Read more on radiookapi.net: Ebola: The Bishop of the Diocese of Butembo-Beni Calls for Compliance with Preventive Measures Schools and Health Centers in Butembo Strengthen Ebola Prevention Measures Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Merchants discuss effects of border closure on their local economy
Earlier this week, Rwanda further tightened its border controls following a confirmed case reported in Goma.
The sales have taken a huge hit," said Dieumerci Shabani, a street vendor selling eggs near the Grande Barriere. Before the closure, he could sell five trays of eggs daily, while now he struggles to sell two. "It is mainly because of the critical socio-economic situation caused by the closure of the borders," Shabani said. "Most of our customers are travelers and cross-border traders.
Discussion of economic impact to the local community can be found here.
What does it feel like to have Ebola? A survivor recalls his ordeal
Senga Omeonga, a Congolese physician, survived Ebola. Nine of his co-workers did not.
In July 2014 as Ebola was exploding in Liberia, Senga Omeonga worked as a doctor at St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital in Monrovia. Among the patients he cared for was the hospital’s director, who had diarrhea and was vomiting repeatedly but tested negative for the Ebola virus.
I was exposed to that patient day by day," says Omeonga, who is originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When the director didn't respond to treatment, a second test was done which came back positive — ten days after his first test.
Patrick Nshamdze was what Dr. Omeonga calls a “wet case” of Ebola. Wet signs and symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea as well as unexplained hemorrhaging. This follows the earlier “dry stage” of Ebola, punctuated by fever, aches, and pains and some disorientation. As the wet stage advances, body secretions — as much as ten liters of diarrhea and vomit in a day — are saturated with the virus, and the patient is extremely infectious.
A deadly viral hemorrhagic disease such as Ebola brings out the worst in people. What people say and do under its shadow can be difficult to comprehend. Some in the early stages of Ebola who have the means to leave the country will lie about their illness.
"A lot of them were lying when they came to the hospital. They didn't even tell you they were having fevers. They'd say they fell down, or were on a motorbike, or someone pushed them, or they went to work and passed out." He was one of 15 who became infected at his hospital, presumably all by the ailing director. Nine of them died. The hospital closed. I started feeling the symptoms on the second of August, a Saturday: high fever, vomiting, and weakness. I didn't have diarrhea. It went on for five days before they could collect a specimen. At that time, the country had only one Ebola treatment unit (ETU) at the ELWA 2 hospital. They were really overwhelmed, and it was really difficult to find a space — even for me as a doctor. It was on the following Friday that they collected the specimen, and on Saturday I learned I was positive, and was taken to the ETU at ELWA 2.
During the week before his transfer to the ETU, he was sent home to recover.
The house was just behind the hospital. This was fortunate: I had access to medication, and nurses and people from the pharmacy helped me. I had oral rehydration salts and medication to stop the vomiting. Day by day, the weakness was getting worse. In the first three days, I was able to manage, but after that, I needed help.
When he was transferred to the ETU, he could still walk — but he believed he was going to die.
The only thing coming was my death. I spoke with my wife and kids and we talked and talked and talked. They were very concerned. They were praying for me and encouraging me. It was a very big support. I was praying myself, having positive thoughts, and telling myself that even if there was only a 10% chance of recovery, I wanted to be among the 10%.
Because he was a physician, he was given ZMapp — which even today is considered experimental. It consists of a cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies and is extremely potent.
Dr. Omeonga went on to make a full, if slow, recovery.
Quotes taken from the New York Times and ScienceDirect.
