When this edition's predecessor went to press in early June, the Democratic Republic of the Congo had recorded around 360 confirmed cases of Bundibugyo-strain Ebola and 62 deaths. A week later the figures have roughly doubled. The health ministry's most recent count — 635 confirmed cases and 127 confirmed deaths, with 260 people in isolation, as of 9 June — puts the case-fatality rate near one in five. The outbreak now spans more than two dozen health zones across three provinces: still concentrated in Ituri, at some 600 cases over eighteen zones but creeping into new ones, with North Kivu at 32 cases and South Kivu at three. Uganda's linked outbreak holds at fifteen cases and one death.
The trajectory matters more than any single number, and it is pointing the wrong way. The World Health Organization says contact tracing in the DRC needs to reach above ninety percent of identified contacts to get ahead of the virus; in early June it stood at about forty-five. Insecurity, displacement and mobile populations — the conditions that have shadowed eastern Congo for three decades — make the painstaking work of finding and watching every contact especially hard, and armed groups have attacked health teams in Ituri.
The harder constraint is biological. Bundibugyo is one of four Ebola species, and unlike the more familiar Zaire strain it has no licensed vaccine and no approved treatment. On 28 May the WHO advised against deploying the existing Zaire-strain vaccine here, citing thin evidence it would help. The response is scaling: on 5 June the Africa CDC and the WHO launched a joint continental preparedness-and-response plan, and Médecins Sans Frontières is building a 65-bed treatment centre in Ituri. But it leans on the oldest tools — isolation, safe burials, supportive care, the slow earning of community trust. Tedros has noted that the DRC has ended sixteen previous outbreaks and voiced real confidence it will end this one. The seventeenth, for now, is still growing.
Sources
Case figures (latest, as of 9 June): DRC Ministry of Health, carried in the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control's 11 June update, ecdc.europa.eu; corroborated by South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases, nicd.ac.za.
Contact tracing and the response gap: WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the 3 June media briefing, who.int.
No vaccine for this strain: the WHO's 28 May advice against the Zaire-strain (rVSV-ZEBOV) vaccine for Bundibugyo, via the WHO Disease Outbreak News, DON605.
The wider response: the 5 June Africa CDC–WHO joint continental response plan and the evolving case picture, WHO Disease Outbreak News, DON606.
Figures vary by source and reporting day; the counts here are the DRC Ministry of Health's most recent at the time of writing — refreshed for Friday's release, and carried in the 11 June ECDC update — and will likely rise. They are attributed as such.
Further Reading
For readers who want the outbreak from more than one vantage — the science, the African response, the live epidemiology, and the harder questions about a thinning international effort — these are good starting points.
The primer: the WHO Ebola virus disease fact sheet — the four species, transmission, treatment, and outbreak history, in plain language.
The African response: the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Union's agency coordinating the continental effort.
The live epidemiology: the ECDC outbreak tracker, updated as new figures land.
The fuller, more critical picture: the 2026 Ituri Province Ebola epidemic overview, which aggregates primary sources and the criticism of a diminished US and Western response after cuts to USAID.