Ebola deaths in DRC surge past 1,300 as virus ‘spreading like a wildfire’

Published 25 July 2026 · health

The outbreak is spreading at the fastest rate ever recorded and threatens to become the worst in history. Nairobi, Kenya – The death toll from

The outbreak is spreading at the fastest rate ever recorded and threatens to become the worst in history. Nairobi, Kenya – The death toll from the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has surged above 1,309, an extraordinary rise of more than 40 percent in just five days, government figures show, as a leading public health consultant says the virus is “spreading like a wildfire”. Updated data released by the government on Saturday showed that as of Thursday, the total number of confirmed cases, including deaths, had climbed to 2,973. This was a 27 percent rise from the figure last Saturday. The unprecedented rate at which cases are increasing and deaths are mounting has made the DRC epidemic the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak ever documented. Compounding the danger, the virus spreading in the DRC is Bundibugyo, which is the rarest of the four variants of Ebola known to affect humans and currently has no approved vaccines or treatments. Abdulsalami Nasidi, a public health consultant who helped establish the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the African Union’s public health agency, told Al Jazeera the lack of a proven vaccine meant the virus was “spreading like a wildfire.” Nasidi said the epidemic was unfolding in an area of active hostilities, compounding the shortage of public health resources common to African governments confronting outbreaks.

Scientists are racing to find a way to slow the epidemic, and the University of Oxford’s Oxford Vaccine Group said a volunteer had received the first dose of a rapidly developed experimental vaccine on Friday. “This is an important milestone for the trial, and marks the next phase in our multinational collaborative journey to develop a Bundibugyo ebolavirus vaccine,” said the Oxford team’s chief investigator, Katrina Pollock. The largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak in history killed more than 11,000 people out of at least 28,000 cases between 2013 and 2016, primarily in West Africa across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. That outbreak took about eight months to reach the first 1,000 deaths. The latest epidemic in the DRC has done so in less than 10 weeks. “We must act now,” Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya wrote in a post on X last week. “If we do not stop it today, this will become the worst outbreak the world has ever documented.” Al Jazeera’s Alain Uaykani, reporting from the DRC city of Goma, said the government’s response had lacked coordination and urgency, leaving medical personnel overstretched and working in poor conditions. He said the death toll among health workers continued to climb on Saturday, with a doctor and a health worker among the latest victims.