The World Health Organization announced that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spread to two more health districts in the country. The total number of affected areas has reached 63 across seven provinces.

The new affected areas are Bulu in South Ubangi Province and Dungu in Upper Uele Province, which borders South Sudan. As of September 23, 7,890 confirmed cases and 3,799 deaths had been reported in the DRC, the WHO added.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that conflict and population displacement are hampering the work of health workers in providing assistance to affected communities and tracking individuals who may have been exposed to the virus.

He noted, however, that overall case numbers are declining, and contact tracing, safe burials, and engagement with local communities have improved, although the intensity of transmission remains uneven across different affected areas.

The decline in the total number of cases does not mean that transmission has stopped in all areas. With incomplete contact tracing, individual chains of transmission may go undetected: in June, health workers were able to reach only 56.3% of 5,681 people, whereas the World Health Organization recommended raising that figure to approximately 95%. Therefore, the geographic scope of the outbreak may continue to expand even as overall statistics improve.

Conflict and population displacement complicate access to patients and the monitoring of people who may have come into contact with those who are sick; under such conditions, patients have fled isolation facilities, and medical workers have faced attacks. Mistrust remains an additional obstacle: due to misinformation, many residents do not seek medical care when Ebola is suspected, which delays the detection of and response to the infection.