More than 5,000 cases of Ebola have been recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the African Union’s health agency said Wednesday, as the conflict-ridden country faces its worst outbreak in history.
Declared on May 15, the DRC’s 17th Ebola outbreak is thought to have already been spreading for several weeks by that point.
It has hit regions in the north and east where the presence of the state is weak, health infrastructure is largely lacking and myriad armed groups have roamed for decades.
The current outbreak has caused 2,378 deaths out of 5,021 confirmed cases, according to the latest data published by Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday.
A 2018-2020 outbreak in the DRC, previously considered the country’s deadliest, killed 2,299 people out of 3,381 confirmed cases, according to World Health Organization (WHO) figures based on Congolese data
