WHO maintains international emergency due to Ebola outbreak in Congo

Published at: 18/08/2026 04:34 PM

The World Health Organization (WHO) decided to maintain the international health emergency due to the Ebola outbreak affecting the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since August 2018, after evaluating the progress of the epidemic, which has registered nearly 5 thousand infections and more than 2 thousand 300 deaths.

The agency's Emergency Committee considered that the situation is still out of control, and therefore called for strengthening containment measures in the affected areas. In addition, the director general of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, stressed that the risk of spread within the African country and to other nations remains high, despite the response efforts deployed by health authorities and their international partners.

This outbreak is the most serious recorded in the history of the DRC and the second largest in the world, surpassed only by the West African epidemic between 2014 and 2016. The Emergency Committee announced that it will meet again in three months to review the evolution of the outbreak again and determine if the global alert level is maintained or modified.

Mazo News Team