Doctors Without Borders says fewer patients in old hotspots do not mean Ebola is under control. Cases are rising in North Kivu and have reached a seventh province.
Goma / Bunia, 21 September 2026 — Médecins Sans Frontières has warned that it would be a mistake to treat the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak as contained. Some treatment centres are admitting fewer patients in the original epicentre, but nationally the curve is not falling. The epidemic is shifting.Anthony Kergosien, MSF emergency coordinator in Bunia, said transmission has slowed for now in parts of Ituri, where the outbreak first took hold. Elsewhere the picture is different. North Kivu now accounts for nearly half of newly confirmed cases, with test positivity rising. South Ubangi has become the seventh affected province. Undetected chains of transmission, MSF says, are already taking hold in operational hubs that were not prepared for a new wave.The outbreak, declared in May, is the largest Ebola epidemic recorded in the DRC. Government figures cited in mid-September put confirmed cases above 7,200 and deaths above 3,500. Health officials have spoken of “encouraging signs” since a mid-August peak, with daily new cases said to have eased from about 120 to around 80 in some tallies. The World Health Organization and Africa CDC have been more cautious: weekly cases in North Kivu have climbed again, and they say it is too early to call a peak.The virus in this epidemic is the Bundibugyo strain. The licensed Ervebo vaccine targets Zaire ebolavirus; its effect against Bundibugyo is not established, which has complicated the campaign. Vaccination of health workers has been rolled out in affected zones, including Ituri, but MSF says basic infection prevention is still missing in several original hotspots even as the disease enters new, weaker health systems.Conflict in the east remains the other constraint. North Kivu is both an epidemic front and a war front. Movement of teams, safe burials and contact tracing compete with insecurity, displacement and a stretched state presence. South Kivu has reported no new cases since May, a reminder that the map is uneven — and that a quiet province can reopen if surveillance slips.For towns that read Kivu24 — Goma, Beni, Butembo, Bunia — the practical message from MSF is narrow: do not read empty beds in one centre as the end of the outbreak. The epidemic is not shrinking in place. It is moving.