Congo's Ebola outbreak becomes second-deadliest on record as aid cuts cripple response

By mid-August, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was in the grip of an Ebola outbreak that had already claimed more than 2,500 lives in just three months. The numbers alone told a story of catastrophic speed: 5,290 confirmed cases scattered across six provinces, a case fatality rate hovering near 48 percent, and in the worst-hit areas, climbing as high as 70 percent. The World Health Organization had declared it a public health emergency of international concern. The Africa Centres for Disease Control warned it could become the deadliest Ebola outbreak ever recorded. One person was dying every 30 minutes.

What made this outbreak remarkable was not just its toll but its velocity. By the 13th week of the epidemic, it had recorded nearly 5,000 confirmed cases and 2,400 deaths—roughly ten times the case count and seven times the death toll of the West African outbreak at the same stage, the one that had killed 11,325 people between 2014 and 2016. The virus was moving faster than any Ebola epidemic before it, fueled by conflict, population displacement, and movement along roads, rivers, and mining routes. In Uganda, by contrast, a similar outbreak had been contained to 20 cases and two deaths, closed by late July. The difference was not the virus. It was whether the sick reached treatment in time.

Yet the machinery to find the sick and get them to care was being dismantled. The virus had been circulating in eastern communities since late February, nearly three months before anyone officially acknowledged it on May 15. That delay was not accidental. A humanitarian official in Kinshasa told reporters that many disease surveillance projects in the DRC had been halted in 2025, starved of funding. The surveillance system that might have caught the outbreak weeks earlier had been defunded first. When the virus finally surfaced, the response had to be improvised from whatever remained.

The vaccine situation illustrated the desperation. The only doses available—70,000 of them—were designed to protect against a different species of Ebola virus. Whether they would work against the Bundibugyo strain circulating now was unknown. Early laboratory data suggested maybe, possibly, they might offer some protection. Twenty thousand doses were set aside for a clinical trial to find out. The remaining 50,000 were for frontline workers. Two vaccines designed specifically for Bundibugyo had entered human trials for the first time this year, after the dying had already started. The DRC government had requested 500,000 more doses. None were forthcoming.

The collapse of the humanitarian response was swift and visible. Action Against Hunger, which had been covering 70 percent of its programs in the DRC with American money, lost more than 47 million euros when that funding was withdrawn. The organization laid off about 100 staff members and closed its office in Mai-Ndombe in December 2025, abandoning 200 children with severe acute malnutrition. In the gold-mining town of Mongbwalu, 20 hospital beds sat boxed in a courtyard—the last ones the organization would deliver. The World Food Programme, which had drawn 60 percent of its funding from Washington, now served only the most vulnerable. In 2025, it had reached one million people with food aid in the DRC; it had been targeting 2.3 million. Camp management, the sector hit hardest, had received only 13.7 percent of the funding it needed.

The epidemiological consequences were immediate and visible. At the Plaine Savo displacement camp, where 76,000 people were crowded into a space designed for 20,000, a third of the latrines were broken. At Kigonze in Bunia, assessments found a deficit of more than 589 latrines that went unmet for lack of resources. Ebola had already killed at least three displaced people in that camp. A virus transmitted through bodily fluids had been introduced into settlements without working sanitation, into a region where conflict had already displaced a million people. Health workers staffing the treatment centers faced lethal conditions of their own: by early August, 155 had been infected and 45 had died, a fatality ratio of 29 percent among them.

The broader context was one of systematic dismantling. The Trump administration had abolished the United States Agency for International Development in 2025 and withdrawn from the World Health Organization. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's support to PEPFAR—the program whose laboratories and epidemiologists diagnose Ebola across the continent—was being converted to a fee schedule on September 30. Any government receiving more than $125 million in US aid, including the DRC and Uganda, would have to purchase a minimum package. The permanent machinery to detect and suppress infectious disease had been systematically taken apart over 18 months. The DRC's 16th Ebola outbreak had been held to 53 cases because a licensed vaccine existed for the Zaire strain and doses were already in the country. For Bundibugyo, identified 19 years earlier, no such vaccine existed. There was no market in developing it. The gold, cobalt, and coltan of the eastern Congo found buyers on every continent. The disease that circulated among the workers who dug them found none.

The intervals between these epidemics were shortening. What was once a rare event in a few villages was becoming a permanent danger across the eastern Congo and the region beyond. The resources to end the outbreak existed in abundance. They were being withheld, priced out, and dismantled by governments that had weighed their cost against Congolese lives and made their choice.