Congo Declares Ebola Outbreak in Ituri Province; 782 Cases and 181 Deaths Confirmed

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo declared an Ebola outbreak on May 15. The epicenter is Ituri province in eastern Congo, where cases first clustered in the mining town of Mongbwalu. As of June 13, official figures showed 782 confirmed Ebola cases and 181 confirmed deaths across eastern Congo.

Health and aid officials said the numbers likely undercount the true toll because of testing delays and unnoticed deaths in villages. Bunia, the capital of Ituri province and home to more than one million people, recorded 212 confirmed cases, the largest total of any location in the outbreak zone.

On the day NPR arrived, a sick man vomited blood on his motorbike taxi driver in central Bunia and died on the spot.

Specialist teams retrieved the body and decontaminated the roadside while family members wept. The driver fled the scene, according to witnesses. Clinique Universelle hospital in Bunia shut down after a patient tested positive for Ebola several days earlier.

Over the weekend, a decontamination team scrubbed the walls with chlorine solution. Patient Mazirane, the 38-year-old director of Clinique Universelle, said he and his colleagues had been working without personal protective equipment. He added that several medical workers had already died.

"We're not afraid, we're very afraid," Mazirane said. Eliezer Kasongo, a 25-year-old community volunteer in Bunia, goes door to door raising awareness about Ebola. "We started to see people die in the neighbourhood and we began to understand," Kasongo said.

"There's fear, people are dying every day," he said. Only 56 percent of contacts have been traced across the three Congolese provinces with active Ebola transmission, according to the Congolese health ministry. Aid organizations have airlifted hundreds of metric tons of medicines and PPE to Ituri, but supplies remain insufficient.