WHO Chief Urges Community Action as Ebola Outbreak Spreads Faster Than Response

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organisation, stepped off a plane in Ituri province on Saturday into the heart of a spreading crisis. A rare strain of Ebola was moving through eastern Democratic Republic of Congo faster than the machinery of response could follow. More than a thousand suspected cases had been recorded. Two hundred and forty-six people were dead.

The visit was meant to signal urgency and commitment. Tedros planned to tour a treatment centre in Bunia, the provincial capital, and sit with local authorities, health workers, and families whose lives had been upended by the virus. But his message to reporters carried an edge of realism: the international community was sending aid, yes, and health facilities were better organised than they had been. Yet something crucial was missing. "Community ownership is important," he said. "We are here to discuss with the community, to see how the response is running and if there are challenges to help." The implication was clear—without the people themselves, without their trust and participation, the outbreak would continue to outpace containment.

The scale of what was unfolding across the region was still being measured. The virus had already crossed into three provinces within the DRC and into neighbouring Uganda, where nine infections and one death had been confirmed by Friday. But those numbers were almost certainly incomplete. The DRC, a vast and unstable country, lacked the laboratory capacity to test suspected cases systematically. The true reach of the outbreak—which had likely been circulating before anyone detected it—remained unknown. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention was tracking at least 1,077 suspected cases, but epidemiologists knew that figure was a floor, not a ceiling.

One small piece of hope had emerged. On Wednesday, a patient who had tested positive for Ebola was discharged from hospital after producing two consecutive negative tests. It was the first confirmed recovery in this outbreak, a reminder that survival was possible, though rare. The haemorrhagic fever kills through close contact and bodily fluids, and it had claimed more than 15,000 lives across Africa over the past half-century. The last major outbreak in the DRC, between 2018 and 2020, had killed nearly 2,300 people out of 3,500 cases.

But the geography of this crisis extended far beyond epidemiology. Ituri province was a place where the state barely functioned. Islamic State-affiliated militants known as the ADF operated there, along with a constellation of ethnic militias that killed civilians with regularity. The neighbouring provinces of North and South Kivu had endured three decades of near-continuous violence. The Rwanda-backed armed group M23 controlled swathes of territory and had reported cases in Goma and Bukavu, cities under its command. The fighting had displaced millions of people. Nearly a million of them were crowded into camps in Ituri province alone, living in conditions of severe overcrowding and poor sanitation. "If Ebola comes, we'll be wiped out as we're packed like sardines," said Dorcas Mapenzi, speaking from the Kingonze camp on the edge of Bunia. The prospect of the virus spreading through those camps had become a source of acute alarm.

Governments were responding with the tools they had. Uganda and Rwanda both closed their borders. Uganda imposed a mandatory 21-day quarantine for anyone arriving from the DRC. The United States, under the Trump administration, banned entry to non-citizens who had recently travelled to Congo, Uganda, or South Sudan. These measures were meant to contain the spread, but they also reflected the fear that the outbreak was already beyond the reach of conventional response. The virus was moving faster than the response could move. Community action, as Tedros had said, was not a nice addition to the effort. It was the only thing that might slow what was coming.