The word Ebola still carries weight. Most people associate it with West Africa and the images that filled the news a decade ago.
Fewer have heard that a different strain is now moving through central Africa, and moving fast.
The outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has crossed 10,000 confirmed cases and nearly 5,000 deaths. Congolese government figures reported on October 27 put the count at 10,060 cases and 4,887 deaths, Al Jazeera reported.
That makes it the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, trailing only the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic.
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According to the World Health Organization, the outbreak was declared on May 15, 2026 and classified as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern two days later.
The virus behind the outbreak is a rare one. It is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, one of the less common species in the Ebola family. The virus has reached 66 health zones across eight provinces of Congo, with Ituri hardest hit. About half of confirmed patients have died.
The outbreak is spreading faster than previous ones
The speed is what sets it apart. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that the outbreak passed 1,000 confirmed cases within 40 days of the response starting.
The 2018 outbreak in the same country needed about 235 days to reach the same mark.
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Contact tracing is also lagging badly. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has said that at least 95 percent of new cases need to come from known contacts of infected people. That is the threshold before an outbreak can be considered under control.
In the current one, only about one in five cases fits that profile.
Health workers in Congo have faced attacks and insecurity in the outbreak zones. In a statement reported by Al Jazeera, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for their protection.
"Everyone working to protect communities from this deadly disease must be able to work in dignity and safety," he said.
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Cases have also appeared beyond Congo. The WHO has recorded imported cases in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria and France, though active transmission outside Congo has so far been contained. Kenyan authorities had screened more than 700,000 travelers by late October.
A new vaccine trial just started in Bunia
Existing Ebola vaccines were built for a different strain. Merck's Ervebo targets the Zaire species of Ebola and has not been tested against Bundibugyo in a large outbreak.
A clinical trial called Tumaini, which means "hope" in Swahili, began on October 23 in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province.
The trial uses a ring vaccination approach, offering shots to people in close contact with confirmed patients, as covered in our earlier report Congo's deadliest Ebola is still spreading: A vaccine trial begins this month.
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Two experimental vaccines designed specifically against Bundibugyo are expected to join the trial soon. One is from Moderna and the other from the University of Oxford, developed with the Serum Institute of India.
For context on scale, the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic infected around 28,600 people and killed more than 11,000 over two years. The current Bundibugyo outbreak reached roughly a third of that case count in about five months.
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This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.