The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has crossed a grim threshold, with more than 1,000 confirmed deaths, making it the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in recorded history. Speaking at a health summit in Ghana on Wednesday, Dr. Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), confirmed 1,031 deaths. "These are people dying. They are dying because we don't have vaccines, we don't have medicine, we don't have funding," he said. In total, 2,473 cases have been confirmed in the DRC, with at least 737 patients currently in isolation or receiving hospital treatment. A further 20 cases and two deaths have been recorded in neighbouring Uganda, though Kampala reports no new cases in the past three weeks.

The outbreak was declared on 15 May in Ituri Province, a region in the DRC's troubled east, before spreading to four additional provinces. It is caused by the Bundibugyo virus — a rare strain of Ebola named after the Ugandan district where it was first identified in 2007 — for which no approved vaccines or treatments currently exist. The virus spreads through close contact with infected bodily fluids, including blood, vomit and semen. A particularly alarming sign is that around 80% of new cases are now emerging outside known chains of transmission, meaning health authorities cannot easily trace or predict where the virus will appear next. The World Health Organization's incident manager for the outbreak, Thierno Balde, acknowledged this week that despite a ramped-up response, "the outbreak remains ahead of us."

The speed of this crisis is unprecedented. The 2013–2016 West Africa epidemic — still the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record, with more than 11,000 deaths from at least 28,000 cases — took roughly eight months to reach 1,000 deaths. The current outbreak has surpassed that milestone far more quickly. Trish Newport, emergency programme manager for Doctors Without Borders, who has been working in Congo, said the delayed identification of the outbreak set the stage for its rapid spread. "There's never been an Ebola outbreak that started with so many cases because it was so late to be identified," she said. "It's like the outbreak is outrunning the response."

There are, however, tentative signs of progress. The University of Oxford's Vaccine Group has launched the world's first human clinical trial of a vaccine targeting the Bundibugyo virus, with Phase I trials assessing safety and immune response in 50 healthy adults in Oxford. Trials for two potential treatments and a post-exposure prophylaxis are also underway in the affected region. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention modelling has outlined a worst-case scenario approaching the scale of the 2014–2016 West Africa epidemic, though epidemiologist Dr. Jean Nachega of the University of Pittsburgh, who is advising African health authorities, said he does not expect the outbreak to reach that level — while stressing that the challenges remain "huge." The WHO has declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and international attention is now focused on whether the response can be scaled up quickly enough to bring the virus under control.