"Spreading Virus" Medical Worker Killed... Half of Confirmed Patients Die

It has been confirmed that the cumulative number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has exceeded 10,000, 165 days after the declaration of the outbreak.

According to Reuters and Xinhua News Agency on the 27th (local time), the DRC's National Institute of Public Health announced that as of the 25th, the country's cumulative confirmed cases totaled 10,060, with 4,887 deaths (a fatality rate of 48.6%).

While this marks the second-largest scale following the 2014–2016 West Africa epidemic, which was the largest Ebola outbreak in history, the initial spread is much faster than back then, when it took eight months to reach 1,000 deaths.

Uganda, which declared the outbreak on the same day as the DRC, reported 20 confirmed cases and 2 deaths. With no additional cases reported since July, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed an end to Ebola in Uganda last August.

However, in the DRC, about 2,000 new confirmed cases are still occurring every month.

The worsening situation is attributed to the virus strain and poor local security.

This outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain, not the Zaire strain—which is the typical Ebola virus—and there are currently no officially approved vaccines or treatments for it.

In addition, many of the outbreak areas are controlled by rebel groups, and residents harbor distrust toward medical staff, hindering smooth intervention by health authorities and making it difficult to prevent the spread.

In fact, on the 24th, in Tshopo province in the northeast, a local nurse was killed in an attack by residents who claimed that "medical workers are contaminating water sources and spreading the virus."

With recent reports of infections and deaths in Kenya and Nigeria as well, this crisis is showing patterns of the widest epidemic in history, spreading beyond central Africa to the east and west.

As cross-border infected individuals recently turned out to have all passed through Uganda, the Ugandan government re-examined whether there were any additional confirmed cases within its borders, stating that there are no other Ebola patients so far.

(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.