It’s almost strange to see the numbers go up so quickly. In 2018, Ebola spread ten times in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It took 235 days for there to be 1,000 cases. In 2026, that line was crossed again, and this time it only took 40 days. Forty days. The number stops you in your tracks because it makes you think that something has changed, and not just with the virus but also with the world around it.
For the second time ever, the Bundibugyo strain is to blame for the spread of Ebola. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there have been more than 5,700 cases and almost 2,750 deaths since the beginning of August 2026. There have been 20 confirmed cases in Kampala, which is the capital of Uganda. In France, only one case has been proven. The virus can be spread by touching the bodily fluids of infected people. The fact that it has spread so far shows how wide the outbreak really is.
Picture what northeastern DRC really looks like. Haute-Uele, Ituri, and Nord-Kivu are not names that came from a health ministry report. They have roads that aren’t reliable at best and can’t be used at all at worst because of years of fighting. A medical team trying to find people who are infected with the disease might have to go through areas that are controlled by militias. There are more issues at hand than just health. Today there is a crisis in both health and safety, and things are getting worse for both.
Health care workers have gotten sick while taking care of patients. It’s that little thing that gets lost in the middle of official briefings that should get more attention than it does. The system is put under stress it wasn’t made to handle when the people who were trained to stop a disease start dying from it, partly because they don’t have enough safety gear and partly because of the violence in the area. A sad irony is that the bravest people in the room are also the ones who stand out the most.
That’s because people in the area have a deep and historically understandable distrust of government institutions. This has been a problem for years that public health officials have been trying to solve. Along with the virus, false information spreads through places where it is present. People who are sick hide them from treatment centers because they are afraid of what will happen or don’t know how to handle it. That level of mistrust isn’t irrational; it’s been there for a long time. But it makes it even harder to find people to talk to.
To be fair, it’s not a small answer. The CDC has about 500 people working on this outbreak. Of those, more than 120 are out in the field right now. When people from the DRC come into the US, they can’t do as much. At some airports, people from Uganda and South Sudan also have to go through more thorough screening. People should also stay away from Ituri and Nord-Kivu, and the US has warned them not to go anywhere else in the affected area.
We don’t know how long this outbreak will last or how far it will spread. Most likely, the things that make it possible—like conflict, a lack of infrastructure, people who move around a lot, and broken trust—won’t go away any time soon. It’s possible that the Bundibugyo strain isn’t as dangerous as the Zaire strain that caused the chaos in West Africa in 2014, but that doesn’t help much since more than 2,700 people have already been confirmed dead. Right now, there is the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever, and it doesn’t look like it will end any time soon.
