Updated July 23, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo—More than 1,000 people have died of Ebola in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, according to official figures released Thursday, with the outbreak showing no sign of slowing.
Health workers have recorded 2,536 cases of Ebola, as well as 1,033 deaths, since the conflict-torn central African nation declared an epidemic May 15.
Congolese Prime Minister Judith Suminwa will travel to the Ebola hotspots in the east of the country Thursday to "assess the realities on the ground," the government stated, accompanied by officials from the US and the United Nations.
Health responders say the conditions on the ground are dire, with fragile hospitals overwhelmed and health responders struggling to catch up to the scale of the epidemic.
The situation is "worsening day by day," Amadou Bocoum, the Congo director for the aid organization CARE International, told NPR. He pointed to deficiencies in contact tracing, funding and a rapid geographic expansion of the disease.
Aid workers are in a race against time to try to bring the situation under control before it spirals further.
Ebola is now spreading in eastern Congo at the fastest rate on record. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it took 10 months to reach 2,000 confirmed cases during Congo's 2018-2019 outbreak, compared to just two months for the current epidemic.
Other complications abound. Armed conflict has plagued the epicenter of the outbreak, Ituri province, for more than 30 years, and more than 900,000 people there live in displacement camps.
One of the mainstays of the local economy is also artisanal gold mining — which attracts informal workers who are highly mobile, and therefore likely to spread Ebola quickly if infected.
Funding is also a problem, as the severely degraded local health system in eastern Congo, as well as NGOs, struggles to cope as Ebola spreads in remote rural areas. In mid-July, the WHO said its joint $518 million plan to fight the disease, with the Africa Centers for Disease Control, faced a funding shortfall of over $400 million.
On the ground, many doctors say that they go without pay too. Health workers in Ituri went on a brief strike this month, for example, walking off Ebola wards and in some instances, burning tires in front of health centers, to protest alleged lack of payment and poor working conditions.
"We cannot continue responding to the epidemic with the same limited resources while it continues to outpace us," said Trish Newport, an emergency program manager for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in a statement this week.
MSF, as well as other aid organizations involved in the response, has also warned that many Ebola treatment centers are operating at full capacity. One consequence is that people suffering from Ebola must often wait at home until a bed becomes available, risking infecting others.
Complicating the response even more, Ebola has also spread farther from Ituri in recent weeks.
The Congolese government confirmed this month that Ebola had reached the provinces of Tshopo and Haut-Uele. Tshopo is a particular concern. According to official figures, four people have died of Ebola in its capital Kisangani, a major trading center of over 1 million people, with direct links to Congo's capital Kinshasa.
Bocoum, the CARE International director, said that funding needed to be scaled up. "If nothing is done, it is unlikely that the situation will be controlled," he said.
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