The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is now the largest the country has ever recorded. In its Disease Outbreak News dated July 30, the World Health Organization counted 3,605 cases and 1,587 deaths across 49 health zones in five provinces, a case fatality rate of roughly 44 percent [1]. That total passes the 2018 to 2020 epidemic in the country's east, which reached 3,317 cases and had stood as the DRC's worst on record [1].
The count has continued to rise since. A tally reported on August 3 put the outbreak at 3,748 cases and 1,657 deaths, a figure carried by the South African outlet Sowetan citing the WHO [2]. We are reporting the July 30 and August 3 numbers separately rather than merging them, because they mark different moments in a still-moving outbreak.
When we last covered this outbreak on August 1, the case count was lower and it had not yet become the country's largest on record. What is new is twofold: the record milestone, and the start of clinical trials of treatments and preventives.
For the first time in this outbreak, patients are being enrolled in therapeutic and prophylactic trials. The monoclonal antibody treatment MBP134 is being tested in a trial run by the medical charity ALIMA together with Doctors Without Borders, with more than 50 patients enrolled [2]. A separate arm is testing obeldesivir as a preventive for people exposed to the virus, and vaccines developed by Oxford and Moderna are in use [2].
The speed of that research is itself part of the story. According to Moorthy, a WHO official quoted in the coverage of the trial rollout, "we have been able to start trials more quickly" [2]. Faster trials mean the therapeutics reach patients while the outbreak is still active, rather than after it ends.
The human arithmetic remains grim. A 44 percent case fatality rate means that, of the people counted as infected by July 30, nearly half had died [1]. The therapeutics now in trials are aimed squarely at bringing that share down for the patients still arriving at treatment centers across the five affected provinces.
