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The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is spreading faster than health partners can scale up their response, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said Wednesday.
The outbreak, declared in mid-May, has become the world's second-largest Ebola outbreak by recorded infections. At least 3,874 cases and 1,751 deaths have been recorded, according to the latest report from the Congolese Health Ministry, putting the case fatality rate at 45.1 percent.
Tedros made the comments while in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital on the Congo River, where he met health and humanitarian partners supporting the Ebola response.
Writing on the social media platform X, he said the outbreak is "spreading faster than our scale-up of the response, with new cases doubling in some hotspots over the past week alone."
He called for all partners to urgently expand efforts across every area of the response and said the outbreak cannot be stopped without the trust, leadership and participation of affected communities.
That includes reaching communities despite insecurity and displacement, strengthening coordination under government leadership, ensuring health workers have adequate protection and training, and accelerating access to care, surveillance and safe burials, he said.
Congo and Uganda have set up a mobile laboratory at their shared border in Kasenyi, a town on the western shore of Lake Albert in Congo's eastern Ituri province, to strengthen Ebola testing capacity in the region.
Kasenyi is a major border crossing with Uganda and has a population of more than 94,000, making it especially vulnerable to the spread of epidemic-prone diseases.
The WHO said the laboratory will allow faster confirmation of cases, support surveillance across the border and help interrupt chains of transmission.
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