Level 1 — Absolute Beginner

There is a very dangerous illness in the east of Congo. The illness is called Ebola. Ebola can make people very sick. Some people die from it.

On Sunday, the Congo health minister opened three new hospitals for sick people. The hospitals are in a place called Ituri. People with Ebola can go there to get help.

The World Health Organization, or WHO, said that this is a big problem for the world. So far, 88 people have died from this Ebola.

Doctors and nurses from many countries are now in Congo. They bring medicine and other help. The news is from May 17 and 18, 2026.

Congo

a large country in central Africa, in full the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Ebola

a very dangerous virus that causes high fever, bleeding and often death

illness

a state of being sick or unwell

hospital

a place where doctors and nurses care for sick people

minister

an important politician in charge of one part of the government, for example health

doctor

a person trained to care for sick people

nurse

a person who works in a hospital and helps care for sick people

medicine

a substance, often a pill or liquid, used to treat an illness

Level 2 — Elementary

On Sunday May 17, 2026, the health minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Samuel-Roger Kamba, told the world that his country was opening three new Ebola treatment centres in the eastern Ituri Province. He visited the area in person and met local health workers.

Earlier the same weekend, the World Health Organization (WHO) had declared the outbreak a 'public health emergency of international concern'. This is a special warning that the WHO uses only for the most serious health problems. It means other countries should help and watch for the illness too.

By Monday May 18, Congolese authorities had counted 10 laboratory-confirmed cases and 336 suspected cases. Eighty-eight people had already died, including several health workers in Bunia, the provincial capital. The outbreak began in early April.

The Ebola virus making people sick this time is called the Bundibugyo strain. This is a rare type of Ebola, and there is no approved vaccine or medicine for it. A team of 35 experts from the WHO arrived in Bunia with about seven tonnes of medical supplies to help.

outbreak

the sudden start of a disease in a place

province

a large area inside a country with its own local government

treatment centre

a building where doctors and nurses care for people with a specific illness

World Health Organization

the part of the United Nations that works on health problems around the world, often called the WHO

public health emergency of international concern

an official WHO warning used for very serious health problems that may spread to other countries

case

one person who is sick with a specific illness

virus

a tiny thing, much smaller than a cell, that can make people or animals sick

vaccine

a medicine that helps the body fight a specific virus or bacteria before a person gets sick

Level 3 — Intermediate

Democratic Republic of Congo Health Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba visited Ituri Province on Sunday May 17, 2026, and announced that three new Ebola treatment centres would open immediately at Bunia, Mongbwalu and Komanda. The move came hours after the World Health Organization elevated the outbreak in eastern Congo and across the border in north-western Uganda to a 'public health emergency of international concern' (PHEIC), the WHO's highest formal designation and the same one used for Covid-19 in 2020 and for mpox in 2022 and 2024.

By the morning of Monday May 18, Congolese authorities had reported 10 laboratory-confirmed cases and 336 suspected cases, with 88 deaths and a probable case-fatality ratio near 25 per cent. Genomic sequencing at the Kinshasa-based Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale has identified the pathogen as the Bundibugyo species of Ebola — a strain first isolated in western Uganda in 2007 and the only ebolavirus with no licensed countermeasure. Existing vaccines such as Ervebo and Zabdeno are effective against Zaire ebolavirus but offer little cross-protection.

An advance team of 35 WHO epidemiologists, clinicians and infection-prevention specialists has flown into Bunia with seven tonnes of supplies, including personal protective equipment, ELISA test kits and the experimental monoclonal-antibody cocktail MBP134, which had been stockpiled by BARDA after promising primate studies. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) has activated its incident-management system at Level 3 and Uganda has begun screening at the Bwera and Ishasha border crossings.

The outbreak's epicentre is the gold-mining town of Mongbwalu, where a funeral on April 6 of a man returning from artisanal pits in Djugu Territory has been traced as the index event. Cross-border movement of traders, internally displaced persons and the M23-related conflict in North Kivu all complicate the response. Health Minister Kamba urged international partners to make rapid contributions to the WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies, while reminding Congolese citizens that safe and dignified burial protocols remain the single most effective short-term intervention.

public health emergency of international concern

the World Health Organization's highest formal alert, used for outbreaks that may cross borders and require a coordinated international response

case-fatality ratio

the proportion of diagnosed cases of a disease who die from it, usually given as a percentage

genomic sequencing

the laboratory technique used to read the complete genetic code of a virus or other organism

Bundibugyo species

a rare type of ebolavirus first identified near the Bundibugyo district of Uganda in 2007, with a fatality rate of roughly 25–40 per cent

monoclonal antibody

a laboratory-made protein that targets a single virus protein, used as treatment or prevention

Level 4 — Advanced

Democratic Republic of Congo Health Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba, on a Sunday May 17, 2026 fly-in to Ituri Province, announced the immediate operationalisation of three Ebola treatment centres at Bunia, Mongbwalu and Komanda. The minister's statement followed by a matter of hours the World Health Organization Director-General's invocation of the International Health Regulations to designate the cross-border Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in the DRC and Uganda a 'public health emergency of international concern' — only the eighth such declaration since the instrument was introduced in 2005, and the third to involve an ebolavirus.

Congolese authorities reported 10 RT-PCR-confirmed cases and 336 suspected cases by 06:00 GMT on Monday May 18, with 88 attributable deaths and an apparent case-fatality ratio of 24.9 per cent — closer to the lower end of historic Bundibugyo experience (25 to 40 per cent) than to the more lethal Zaire-strain outbreaks of 2014 and 2018. Genomic sequencing at the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, working with Belgium's Institute of Tropical Medicine, has placed the index isolate within a clade closely related to the 2012 Bundibugyo strain recovered in Kibaale, suggesting a likely zoonotic spill-over from the Egyptian rousette fruit bat reservoir rather than a re-emergence from a chronically infected survivor.

The therapeutic challenge is acute: neither Merck's Ervebo nor Bavarian Nordic's two-dose Zabdeno/Mvabea regimen carries an approved indication beyond Zaire ebolavirus, and animal-model cross-protection against Bundibugyo is modest. The forward-deployed WHO 'go-team' has brought a tranche of BARDA's strategic stockpile of MBP134, a pan-ebolavirus monoclonal-antibody cocktail engineered by Mapp Biopharmaceutical and Adimab targeting conserved epitopes on the glycoprotein chalice, which retained 100 per cent survival in non-human-primate Bundibugyo lethal challenge studies published in Cell Host & Microbe in 2023. CEPI has indicated that the Phase 1 trial of the Sabin Vaccine Institute's monovalent Bundibugyo candidate could be reactivated within four weeks under emergency-use listing.

Operationally, the outbreak is unfolding in one of the most complex contexts the WHO has encountered: artisanal gold mining draws transient labour from Djugu Territory and South Sudan; the M23 conflict has displaced more than 2.4 million people in adjacent North Kivu; and porous border crossings at Bwera and Ishasha funnel daily trader traffic into Uganda's Kasese district, where the first three confirmed Ugandan cases — relatives of the index patient — were detected on May 15. Africa CDC has activated its incident-management system at Level 3 and seconded 60 staff. The funding envelope, however, remains thin: the WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies disbursed only US$2.1 million in initial seed money, against an internal needs estimate north of US$140 million for the first six months.

International Health Regulations

the legally binding 2005 framework that obliges WHO member states to detect, report and respond to events of international public-health significance