Overview
- The World Health Organization raised the national risk level for the Democratic Republic of Congo to "very high" on Friday after the rare Bundibugyo ebolavirus spread through insecure eastern provinces and crossed the border into Uganda.
- DRC authorities and WHO report about 82 confirmed cases with seven confirmed deaths and roughly 750 suspected cases with 177 suspected deaths, figures that responders say undercount the true scale as testing expands.
- Uganda confirmed three new cases on Saturday, bringing its total to five, and has stepped up contact tracing and travel screening after infections included a driver and a health worker linked to known cases.
- Response operations are strained because standard diagnostics can miss Bundibugyo, contact tracing is lagging with roughly one in five contacts followed on a sampled day, and community resistance has produced attacks that forced patients to flee treatment tents.
- With no licensed vaccines or approved treatments for Bundibugyo, WHO has prioritized rapid clinical evaluation of a small set of existing candidates while warning that a strain-specific vaccine could take several months to develop and deliver.