Workers from the Uganda Red Cross Society don protective suits as they prepare to evacuate the body of a suspected Ebola victim in Kampala on May 26, 2026.
Unlike other residents of Mongbwalu, a town at the heart of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's latest devastating Ebola outbreak, Laureine Sakiya believes that the blood-letting virus exists after seeing some of her neighbours die.
Already suspicious of the Congolese state following decades of neglect and conflict, many in the outbreak's epicentre in the northeastern Ituri province are split between criticism of the government's response and denial of the disease's very existence.
Gold-diggers and hawkers criss-cross mineral-rich and conflict-torn Ituri. Mud-covered motorbikes of travelling Congolese are a regular sight in Mongbwalu, some 100 kilometres from Uganda and just 200 kilometres away from unstable South Sudan.
In the space of several weeks, the outbreak has spread to several provinces nearby and on to Ugandan soil, with the World Health Organization declaring the epidemic an international emergency.
