The country’s Ministry of Public Health shared on X on Wednesday, June 10 that, as of June 9, there had been 635 confirmed cases and 127 deaths recorded in the provinces of Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu, with the contact follow-up rate rising to 61.1 percent. A total of 30 people have recovered from Ebola in the Central African country since the start of the outbreak.
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It comes after DR Congo’s Ministry of Communication and Media wrote on X the previous day that 297 patients were receiving care in treatment facilities, and that 25 of the country’s 104 health zones have been affected by the virus.
The United Nations reported on Monday, June 8, that neighboring Uganda had seen 19 confirmed cases and two deaths, including one probable case who has died.
At a U.N. press briefing in Geneva on Monday, June 8, the World Health Organization’s health emergency alert and response operations director, Dr. Abdirahman Mahamud, said he had witnessed clear progress by health workers and frontline responders in the fight against the outbreak in DR Congo.
He attributed the increase in confirmed cases to a rise in testing and contact tracing, though tracing efforts are still behind the curve of the outbreak. Last week, Dr. Tedros Adhanom-Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the W.H.O., said in a briefing that the contact follow-up rate needs to increase to above 90 percent.
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The current outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of the virus was declared on May 15, per Reuters, with the W.H.O. declaring it a public health emergency two days later, but it may, in fact, have gone undetected for weeks.
Testing kits used in the region were designed to detect the Zaire strain of the virus, which is more common, rather than the Bundibugyo virus, which is relatively rare.
Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, the W.H.O.’s Ebola Response Team incident manager and acting emergency director for the W.H.O.’s Regional Office for Africa, explained, via ABC Australia, “The community has been exposed before to Ebola, but this one is a new strain, a new species for which there is no vaccine, there is no treatment.”
“And we’ve already vaccinated [this community] in the past … so now we have to explain to them in order for them to understand. The first time they had Ebola, they didn’t know about the six species that exist; they just know Ebola.”
Last month, the W.H.O. said that a vaccine to treat the Bundibugyo variant could take up to nine months to develop.
PEOPLE reached out to the World Health Organization and DR Congo’s Ministries of Health and of Communication and Media for updates but did not immediately hear back.
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