Bundibugyo Ebola in DRC and Uganda

One cut since yesterday: 86 confirmed cases and 57 deaths, from Ituri (49), North Kivu (32) and Haut-Uele (5), with Tshopo, South Kivu and Bas-Uele flat. North Kivu took 37% of the day's new cases and 40% of the deaths, a one-day share well above its usual. The previous cut, data as of 30 August, sat at 6,100 cases and 2,950 deaths. WHO's own weekly series has closed most of its gap to national reporting: external situation report 15, data as of 23 August, carries 5,584 confirmed cases and 2,680 deaths; report 16, with the 30 August cut, was due on the weekly Tuesday cadence and has not yet landed on the Africa Region page.

The case-fatality rate has climbed from 45.5% on 5 August to 48.5% now, because deaths keep accruing against cases confirmed earlier. The latest day ran 57 deaths against 86 new confirmations, about two deaths for every three new cases, above the recent average of roughly half. UN News framed the pace on 14 August as one death every thirty minutes; 57 deaths in a day is faster than that arithmetic.

Both rankings are settled at WHO level. On 18 August the Director-General told the second IHR Emergency Committee that this is the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded and the fastest-moving; on 17 August UN News reported WHO describing it as the deadliest in DRC's history. That second claim closes the comparison this page tracked through early August: the combined death toll passed the 2,299 of the 2018-2020 Kivu epidemic during the week ending 17 August, the last ranking Kivu led. Only the 2013-2016 West Africa epidemic, with more than 11,300 deaths, remains ahead.

Any read of the daily curve rests on notification counts WHO says undercount the epidemic by a factor of two to four. At a WHO briefing on 14 July, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, Executive Director of WHO's Health Emergencies Programme, put his name to the estimate: "We think, with some of our support and modelling, the scale of the outbreak is at least 2-4 times the number of cases we are finding." A figure ECDC carries from the WHO Africa Region situation report shows how much of the epidemic happens out of sight: 92.3% of 430 deaths investigated up to 5 July occurred in the community or before admission to a health facility. Africa CDC also cautions that part of the rise reflects cases and deaths only now being confirmed or recorded, so single-day movements should not be read as a clean incidence curve. The apparent case-fatality rate of 48.5% reflects confirmed-case reporting and will keep moving as late deaths and suspected cases are classified.

The assessments hardened on 20 and 21 August. On Friday 21 August, briefing reporters from Bunia, Julien Harneis, the UN's senior Ebola coordinator, called the growth exponential: more than 2,500 dead with half of those deaths in the preceding twenty days, an affected area now larger than France, and transmission outpacing the response. He put health-worker infections at about 160 including 43 deaths and warned that without more staff and resources reaching remote areas the epidemic will keep expanding and risks crossing into neighbouring countries. On the Thursday, 20 August, Africa CDC's head of emergency preparedness and response, Yap Boum II, estimated the official count may capture only 30 to 40% of actual infections, implying an outbreak up to three times the reported size; director general Jean Kaseya has said the epidemic is not under control, could eventually surpass the West African death toll unless the response changes, and has pointed to evidence suggesting transmission began around February, months before the 15 May declaration.

WHO's flagship products still lag national reporting, but the gap narrowed on 28 August. Disease Outbreak News 616, the first since 14 August, carries the 26 August cut, four days behind the source and level with ECDC. It supplies three numbers this page had been missing: the denominator behind the contact-tracing percentage, 22,091 contacts seen of 26,850 to follow up in the preceding 24 hours; PARTNERS trial enrolment above 250 confirmed cases; and 76 Ebola-related signals investigated across 23 countries and territories between 18 May and 28 August, of which 92% were ruled out, the first quantification we have of what international surveillance is actually catching. It also sets this outbreak's 48.1% case-fatality rate against the only two Bundibugyo outbreaks before it, 30% in Uganda in 2007 and 50% in DRC in 2012, and restates the risk assessment as very high for DRC and high for bordering countries. The earlier DON614 of 1 August remains the reference for health-worker infections (151 confirmed including 44 deaths as of 30 July) and for epidemiological week 30, then the worst of the outbreak at 567 cases and 296 deaths. ECDC remains the freshest structured channel and the only one publishing the province split alongside operational numbers. ReliefWeb hosts the primary INSP documents but refuses automated requests, so our figures rest on relays rather than the source PDF.

Ituri holds 81.9% of cumulative confirmed cases and 76.7% of deaths, down from 87% and 81% in early August, not because transmission there has slowed but because North Kivu keeps growing into the second front on a caseload a sixth of the size. No province added a health zone on this cut, the pause that began after North Kivu went from 13 to 15 in two days the previous week; the growth is inside existing zones, and North Kivu's one-day take of 32 cases and 23 deaths is the clearest sign that the second front is not cooling. North Kivu's cumulative case-fatality ratio of 67.9% remains by far the worst of the six against 48.6% nationally. Bas-Uele, the newest province, holds at four cases and three deaths. Tshopo keeps showing dispersion without density: seven affected health zones on nineteen cumulative cases is a province collecting separate introductions rather than building a cluster, and that is the pattern that preceded North Kivu becoming a second front. South Kivu has been flat at three cases since late May.

Bas-Uele entered the count when a confirmed case with symptom onset on 4 August surfaced in Buta, a provincial hub with travel history to Haut-Uele; ECDC's 21 August update records two confirmed cases including one death there. The province had been on the preparedness list for weeks: DRC's Interior Ministry included Bas-Uele in its 30 June ban on mass gatherings, and a national rapid-response team was deployed there while it still counted zero cases. Preparedness became response within six weeks, which is the argument for doing it everywhere else too. Bas-Uele borders the Central African Republic and South Sudan to the north, and Africa CDC has flagged growing transmission there as making cross-border surveillance increasingly urgent.

Movement across the front lines in North Kivu is now also being restricted by an armed group rather than a state. On 21 August the M23 rebel administration announced that shared taxis and passenger boats between government-held and M23-held areas of the province would be suspended for one month from Saturday 22 August, after reports that two travellers had tested positive in a village under its control; other transport continues under strict health controls. North Kivu is the outbreak's second front, and on the ECDC province split its cumulative case-fatality ratio stands at about 68%, by far the worst of the six provinces against roughly 48% nationally.

The route into the two newest provinces is documented. On 30 June, Reuters reported that DRC health authorities were tracing possible spread to Haut-Uele and Tshopo, both linked to Ituri's Niania health zone. In Tshopo, the body of a pregnant woman who fell ill in Niania on 18 June and died on 27 June was carried about 300 kilometres by motorcycle to Kisangani, where a morgue sample tested positive. In Haut-Uele, two Niania contacts who had been placed in isolation fled to the province, one testing positive and the other awaiting confirmation, before both were returned to Niania. Haut-Uele borders South Sudan and the Central African Republic, and Tshopo lies west of Ituri around the Congo River hub of Kisangani, so Haut-Uele's involvement means the whole of DRC's northeast, home to about 15 million people, is now affected. Haut-Uele became the fourth officially affected province on 10 July and Tshopo the fifth by ECDC's 13 July update. INSP judged that although both provinces' cases appear imported from Nia-Nia in Ituri, both should be treated as epidemic zones.

The health-zone ranking, last published in the 18 July report, reads Bunia 621 cumulative confirmed cases, Rwampara 440, Mongbwalu 360, Nizi 198 and Nyankunde 99, against the Bunia 247, Rwampara 195, Mongbwalu 189 and Nyankunde 68 that WHO DON608 recorded on 17 June. Nizi, a gold-mining zone north of Bunia, did not feature among the top-ranked zones a month earlier and is now fourth.

Uganda's outbreak is over twice over. The Ministry of Health declared it ended on 28 July 2026, and WHO concurred on 26 August after 42 days without a new confirmed case, closing the four-week gap this page had been tracking between the two. The final count is 20 confirmed cases: 15 with travel links to DRC and five associated with local transmission, all within the two districts of Kampala and Wakiso in the Kampala metropolitan area. The most recent confirmed case was reported on 21 June and none followed. Those 20 cases and 2 deaths stay inside the cumulative headline, which counts the epidemic rather than the active caseload. The DRC outbreak is unaffected and its own 42-day clock has not started.

France reported one imported confirmed case on 24 June in a doctor returning from a DRC transmission zone, now recovered. ECDC and CDC list it alongside two US citizens infected in DRC and treated in Germany, the first a doctor treated at Berlin's Charite hospital from May and discharged after about two weeks, the second a humanitarian worker admitted to Frankfurt University Hospital on 13 July. EbolaIntel notes all three separately and keeps them outside the DRC-plus-Uganda headline, which is why our total differs from running tallies that fold France in. Uganda and Rwanda have both closed their borders with DRC, and Africa CDC has named 10 at-risk neighbouring countries: Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia. WHO assesses risk as very high in DRC, high in Uganda and in countries bordering documented BDBV detection, and low for the rest of Africa and globally.

Two G7 countries have closed their borders over this outbreak, against WHO advice. A US CDC order suspends the entry of foreign nationals who have been in DRC, Uganda or South Sudan within the prior 21 days; a continuation was signed on 13 July for 30 days, and CDC's situation page records a further renewed order of 12 August keeping the restrictions in force. US citizens are exempt from that order but face a separate restriction: since 13 July the US has barred citizens who have been in DRC from boarding commercial flights home until they have spent at least 21 days in a third country, enforced through a do-not-board list, with case-by-case humanitarian exceptions. Samaritan's Purse, which has about 80 US citizens deployed in DRC and operates roughly 100 beds, said the requirement will impede staffing of treatment facilities; its chief executive Franklin Graham said it will "hurt us getting the staff that we need" and objected to health workers being treated "like they are damaged goods". Canada barred foreign nationals who have been in DRC in the previous 21 days from 20 July, and on 28 August, one day before that order was due to lapse, extended the measures for a further 30 days to 28 September 2026. The extension keeps the entry bar in place for foreign nationals who have been in DRC, Uganda or South Sudan in the previous 21 days including those already holding valid visas, holds immigration and visa decisions for residents of the three countries, and continues a 21-day quarantine for travellers returning from them. Ottawa describes its own domestic risk as low and the measures as precautionary, which is the same week WHO restated its advice against any restriction of travel to or trade with affected countries. US officials cited greater community spread into western DRC as their rationale; no primary source has confirmed a case outside the six eastern provinces now in the official count, so that should be read as the stated basis for the policy rather than as a confirmed geographic extension.

The heads of WHO, the WHO African Region and Africa CDC published a joint commentary on 25 August, under a title arguing that the deadliest Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak can be stopped. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Mohamed Yakub Janabi and Jean Kaseya call this DRC's seventeenth Ebola outbreak, the second largest ever recorded and moving faster than any before it, fuelled by insecurity from decades of armed conflict; they put it at 5,290 confirmed cases and 2,516 deaths across 56 health zones as of 21 August, with 158 health workers infected and 45 dead. Their ask is arithmetic rather than rhetoric: surveillance, treatment centres, infection prevention and community engagement all scaled to two or three times current capacity. The commentary names no vaccine and no therapeutic anywhere in its prescription, which is the shape of this outbreak in one detail. The case for stopping it rests entirely on response infrastructure, because no licensed medical countermeasure targets the strain causing it.

Africa CDC and WHO issued a joint call on 6 August, after a senior delegation visited the affected provinces, for an urgent scale-up of community-led response. They reported DRC at 3,973 confirmed cases, 1,801 deaths and 776 recoveries across 51 health zones as of 4 August, and named resistance to some response activities, misinformation and population movement as the barriers. Their prescription is the one Kaseya has repeated since June: communities directly involved in surveillance, referrals, treatment, safe and dignified burials and decisions affecting their families, testing and treatment brought closer to where people live, treatment capacity expanded, and frontline health workers protected, equipped, supported and paid on time. The last of those remains unsettled in the official record more than three weeks after the Rwampara and Bunia strikes began.

The largest funding movement of the outbreak was announced on 5 August. The US Department of State said it intends, working with Congress, to provide an additional US$242 million for Ebola response and preparedness in DRC and Uganda and for related humanitarian assistance, taking total direct State Department assistance for this outbreak past US$512 million and making the United States the largest single financial contributor to the response. The announcement is aligned with the commitment of up to a further US$500 million made at the G7 leaders summit on 16 June. The release describes the money as covering emergency operations, surveillance and early detection, isolation and treatment, laboratory strengthening, community engagement and screening at points of entry, and reports nearly 300 metric tonnes of supplies distributed, support to more than 180 health facilities and more than 8.6 million health screenings. It sits against an Africa CDC estimate that the whole response needs about US$1.4 billion, and alongside the entry restrictions from the same government that organisations running treatment beds say impede staffing. Marking one hundred days since the declaration, Africa CDC director general Jean Kaseya told AFP on 23 August that partners have promised about US$1 billion and that roughly US$700 million is already counted as committed, and he pressed for the money to reach the organisations working on the ground. The Director-General posted on X on 22 August, quoted by AFP, calling on all actors to do more to end the epidemic.

Treatment capacity is growing with it. UN News reported on 3 August that the International Medical Corps had opened a 100-bed Ebola treatment centre at the Kigonze displacement camp on the outskirts of Bunia, described as the largest in the country, with US support. Reporting back from Bunia at a WHO briefing on 14 July, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu said treatment capacity there was close to 800 beds and rising weekly and that laboratory capacity had grown from 1 laboratory to 14, but that despite this "we have not caught up in the race". He named four constraints still holding the response back: a funding gap, attacks on health centres, the armed conflict in eastern DRC, and community mistrust. On 7 July, WHO's representative in DRC, Dr Anne Ancia, put the assessment plainly: "We would like to say it is stabilising, but frankly, we cannot say it yet."

The response is also disrupted from inside. On 13 July, dozens of staff at the Rwampara Ebola treatment centre in Bunia, among them epidemiologists, case investigators, drivers and gravediggers, stopped work over salaries and bonuses unpaid since the outbreak was declared, closing the facility and blocking its access road; strikers said suspending care and clinical surveillance would leave hospitalised patients with almost no chance. Health workers at Bunia General Hospital also walked out, and INSP confirmed that continuity of essential health services in Bunia and Rwampara had been compromised. Staff agreed on 14 July to resume work on condition the government paid within 72 hours, and health minister Roger Kamba said the delay came from verifying the response payroll after unrelated names were added to it. Work resumed after Ituri's military governor, Major-General Gaby Kasongo Mulumba, met the response's strategic coordination on 15 July, but the deadline passed without payment.

At a press briefing in Bunia on 18 July, officials committed to paying the arrears and announced corrective measures rather than a date: validating personnel lists, digitalising the payment system and shifting progressively to digital payments. They attributed the arrears to administrative and logistical problems rather than to a lack of money, and Radio Okapi reported on 19 July that no payment date had been given. The dispute remains unresolved in the official record: the 18 July situation report still lists non-payment of response workers among its principal challenges and records the impact as an interruption of response activities including safe and dignified burials. SOS Medias Burundi reported on 18 July that the action had spread to Butembo, Beni and Kisangani; that rests on a single outlet and we have not corroborated it. On 25 July a fresh walkout hit Bunia's Elikya treatment centre, where the Associated Press reported about 100 doctors, nurses and security staff stopped work over two months of unpaid performance bonuses; the response's operations chief Adelard Lufongola said the same day that payments were being cleared through mobile money. Rwampara and Bunia are the same two sites hosting the EBO-PEP prophylaxis trial.

Security is the other constraint, and it is quantified. On 18 July the Associated Press reported at least a dozen attacks on health facilities and health workers during this outbreak, attributed to Pierre Akilimali, incident manager for the response. Response staff have been held captive in some health zones and safe-burial teams threatened in cemeteries, and safety fears are pushing health and aid workers to withdraw from remote communities into Bunia, shrinking the surveillance footprint precisely where undetected chains are suspected. The most recent incident was at Nyankunde in Ituri on 15 July, where a crowd attacked the hospital and the adjoining treatment centre after a woman who had come to give birth died of severe anaemia when the hospital declined a blood transfusion her family offered, transfusions being restricted under outbreak protocol. Stones were thrown, the perimeter fence was damaged, several patients escaped, the medical team withdrew and the generator stopped working; Samaritan's Purse evacuated staff and treatment resumed the next day. The situation report also records an attack on safe-burial teams at the Muchanga bridge and community resistance at Komanda and Mandima, and attributes access constraints to the armed groups CODECO and ADF. UN OCHA has recorded 76 security incidents affecting response and aid workers across Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu, with 45 wounded; on 7 July attackers raided a treatment centre in Butembo and set part of it alight.

The 18 July report keeps numbers on capacity: 724 patients in isolation, 272 confirmed and 452 suspected, against 857 beds nationally, an occupancy rate of 84.5%. North Kivu was over its limit at 123.1%, with 181 patients in 141 beds, while Ituri ran at 76.3% and Tshopo at 40%. The Musienene health zone in North Kivu, which has no treatment or transit centre at all, took four of that province's 16 new confirmed cases. Only 175 of 1,170 triage units in Ituri were functional, with shortages of protective equipment and chlorine listed among the drivers of frontline infections, and four patients absconded from treatment structures in 24 hours. Of the 40 deaths confirmed that day, 30 were community deaths detected by post-mortem swab and 10 occurred inside a treatment centre, the ratio that keeps the response behind the virus. Surveillance volume is high: 872 alerts in a day, 825 investigated within 24 hours, validating 192 suspected cases of whom 80 were community deaths. Laboratory positivity was 38.1% in Ituri against 12.6% in North Kivu, and national test positivity has since been reported above 40%, a rate that is itself evidence of under-testing.

The operational numbers are at their best since the summer low. ECDC puts contact-tracing follow-up at 88% of identified contacts as of 31 August, up from 86.3% the day before and from 82.3% on 26 August, though still below the 95% operational target, always a share of identified contacts rather than of the contacts that exist; Africa CDC director general Jean Kaseya had dropped the hedging in remarks to the Associated Press published by STAT News on 4 August: "Contact tracing is not working." He put the share of new cases arising outside traced chains at 60 to 70%. WHO's Disease Outbreak News of 28 August supplies the denominator behind the 26 August figure: 22,091 contacts seen out of 26,850 listed for follow-up in the preceding 24 hours, so the roughly 4,800 people missed on a single day are the arithmetic behind the gap Kaseya describes. Isolation facilities hold 830 patients, up from 814, and recoveries reached 1,409 in DRC, up from 1,383. Earlier in the response, WHO reported treatment capacity growing from fewer than 10 beds to more than 500 across 19 health centres and laboratory capacity to more than 2,000 tests a day, alongside more than 21,000 community health workers in training. On 16 July the Global Fund approved US$4.6 million for an intensified malaria response across four Ituri health zones, explicitly to protect the Ebola response by reducing the number of febrile patients who present as suspected Ebola cases and occupy isolation beds. On 15 July, Medecins Sans Frontieres appealed for an urgent scale-up of the international medical response in Ituri, reporting that its 90-bed Elikiya centre in Bunia is almost always at full capacity, so patients keep arriving late and critically ill. On 2 July the UN Development Programme estimated the outbreak could cut DRC economic output by more than US$1 billion and push nearly one million more people into poverty.

Response planning now reaches beyond the six affected provinces. Reporting on 21 August described a plan to block transmission toward the major riverside population centres, above all Kinshasa, a megacity of nearly 20 million where no Ebola case has been confirmed, while reducing the risk of cross-border spread to the Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic; Africa CDC framed it as also addressing the distrust that has produced delayed treatment and resistance to response teams. Community hostility persists: NPR reported that residents attacked a health team in the territory of Aru on 17 August after a suspected case was reported there, setting fire to an ambulance and damaging two other vehicles. Save the Children estimates at least 180 Congolese children have lost both parents or caregivers since the outbreak began.

The violence has an operational bill. Detailing the weekend's incidents on 19 August, RFI reported that motorcycle riders attacked a response team in Aru territory on 17 August and vandalised ambulances, wounding one paramedic; UN coordinator Julien Harneis called that attack unacceptable in a statement from Bunia. The same account has local youths sacking Kandoy hospital in the Biringi health zone as an ambulance arrived to collect two suspected cases: the driver was left gravely injured and in a coma, and the two suspected cases vanished along with other recovering post-operative patients. Two days earlier, the response opened only 21 of the 171 decontamination rings planned in Ituri, abandoned a safe burial at Epulu-Zunguluka in Mambasa, saw a nurse assaulted at Apodo in Haut-Uele and lost a body to a community at Tuluba before it could be sampled. Ambulances are scarce: two broken down in Ituri, five operational in North Kivu, ten requested for Haut-Uele.

The campaign began on Thursday 27 August, when health minister Roger Kamba gave the first dose to a health worker in Kisangani, the provincial capital of Tshopo, more than three months into the emergency. More than 50,000 of the released doses had reached the country by then, after a first tranche of more than 16,000 landed on 22 August. The rollout starts in Tshopo, Bas-Uele and Haut-Uele, the three least affected of the six counted provinces, and works inward: "We will cover all the provinces that are around Ituri, moving in the ring towards the centre", Kamba said, having framed the priority as protecting "first those who are on the front line". Officials describe the frontline-worker component as compassionate use, the route that allows an unapproved product to be given in a serious disease, and their stated rationale is that the two viruses are related closely enough that Ervebo may cross-protect. That is a hypothesis rather than a finding. It is what the 20,000-dose trial is designed to test, and until it reports there is no human efficacy data for Ervebo against Bundibugyo virus.

On 2 July, WHO announced that patient enrolment had begun in the PARTNERS trial, the Platform Adaptive Randomised Trial for New and Repurposed Filovirus TreatmentS, the first clinical trial of treatments for Bundibugyo virus disease, which enrolled its first patient in Bunia. Sponsored by WHO and coordinated by the Congolese National Institute of Biomedical Research, the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp and the University of Oxford, it randomises patients of any age with confirmed disease to standard care alone, standard care plus MBP134, standard care plus remdesivir, or both drugs plus standard care, with mortality at 28 days as the primary endpoint and a target of 700 to 1,000 participants over six months. The United States and Gilead Sciences are donating the doses. On 18 August the Director-General reported enrolment had reached 100 patients across three facilities in Ituri, and WHO's Disease Outbreak News of 28 August puts it above 250 confirmed cases across the same three sites, roughly fifteen enrolments a day over the ten days between the two figures.

On 14 July, recruitment opened in Ituri for EBO-PEP, the first trial of any post-exposure prophylaxis against Bundibugyo virus. It tests obeldesivir, an investigational oral antiviral developed by Gilead with no Bundibugyo-specific human efficacy data, in nearly 1,000 participants aged over 12 who had direct contact with a confirmed case within the previous five days and are symptom-free at enrolment, with daily monitoring for 21 days and a final visit at day 42. The first PEP centres sit alongside the ALIMA-run treatment centres in Bunia and Rwampara. It is coordinated by ALIMA with DRC's INRB and France's ANRS Emerging Infectious Diseases, supported by Medecins Sans Frontieres and Africa CDC, and funded by EUR 3.4 million from the Global Health EDCTP3 partnership, US$1 million from Africa CDC and US$5 million combined from DRC and South Africa. Several newsrooms have described it as a Gilead-run trial, which it is not. A secondary protocol offers compassionate-use remdesivir to children under 12 and to pregnant or breastfeeding women, who are excluded from the obeldesivir arm.

On 13 July, the Oxford Vaccine Group launched BD-Ebov, the world's first Phase 1 trial of a Bundibugyo vaccine candidate, testing ChAdOx1 BDBV for safety and immune response in 50 healthy adults aged 18-55 in Oxford. On 24 July it vaccinated the first volunteer, the first time ChAdOx1 BDBV has been given to a human, with further volunteers being enrolled and dosed over the following weeks. UN News reported on 4 August that a second Bundibugyo-specific vaccine trial had started in Canada that week, and on 18 August the Director-General stated that two vaccines designed specifically against Bundibugyo virus have entered human trials; the second candidate's developer is not named in the reporting available to us. On 30 July CEPI announced up to US$8.5 million for Hilleman Laboratories, an MSD and Wellcome joint venture, to develop and manufacture rVSV-platform Bundibugyo vaccine doses for clinical trials from IAVI-generated seed material. Nothing here is approved: every product named on this page remains investigational, and no Bundibugyo vaccine or therapeutic has received Emergency Use Listing or prequalification.

On 1 June, CEPI committed up to US$62 million to fast-track three BDBV vaccine candidates: up to US$50 million for a Moderna mRNA candidate, US$8.6 million for the Oxford ChAdOx1 BDBV candidate, and US$3.2 million for the IAVI rVSV-BDBV candidate, covering preclinical work and Phase 1 trials. On 9 June it added US$1.9 million to Public Health Vaccines LLC to generate master viral seed stock for a second rVSV-based Bundibugyo candidate, a fourth developer alongside Moderna, Oxford and IAVI.

The only regulatory milestone this outbreak has produced is diagnostic rather than preventive or therapeutic: on 2 July WHO added the first Bundibugyo virus test to its Emergency Use Listing, an RT-qPCR kit from Shanghai ZJ Bio-Tech that detects and distinguishes pathogenic ebolavirus species. No vaccine and no therapeutic has received Emergency Use Listing or prequalification for Bundibugyo virus, a point the International Pandemic Preparedness Secretariat restated in its 100 Days Mission Day 60 report on 16 July.

Alongside the trials, the wider response architecture: WHO and Africa CDC launched a six-month US$518 million continental preparedness and response plan on 5 June covering June to November 2026, DRC President Tshisekedi announced a national response plan budgeted at US$319 million on 30 June, and CDC said on 18 June that it had more than 125 staff in DRC and Uganda and had accessed US$107 million in emergency funding. On 17 June, WHO issued filovirus clinical-management guidelines covering Bundibugyo virus disease, with emphasis on early recognition, rapid referral, optimized supportive care, laboratory monitoring, careful rehydration, shock management, antibiotics when bacterial infection is present, and structured after-care for survivors.

A Rockefeller Foundation and Echelon Insights poll published on 7 July, fielded 12-16 June among 2,022 US voters, found that 75% of Americans support restoring US disease-prevention aid for the DRC Ebola outbreak and 90% support funding overseas disease-prevention programmes generally. The State Department announcement of 5 August, which takes total direct US assistance for this outbreak past US$512 million, is the largest single reversal of that trend the outbreak has produced, though it arrives through a different channel than the dismantled agency and alongside entry restrictions that treatment providers say cost them staff.