The current and ongoing outbreak affecting a handful of African nations is proving to be one of the biggest to date. The World Health Organisation has issued a statement wherein it claims the first-month reported cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo are the highest of any Ebola outbreak to date, with a surge of confirmed cases occurring due to the disease's spread in urban environments, according to Reuters.
So far, the Bundibugyo outbreak in the DRC is said to have led to over 1,000 confirmed cases, with 267 deaths in total so far too. It's also mentioned that the complete list of cases may be incomplete as the virus is thought to have been circulating for months before being declared on May 15.
Abdirahman Mahamud, director of health emergency alert and response operations at WHO, has stated that relief and support efforts "need to scale up" because the outbreak is now "moving faster than us".
So far, the outbreak is a distance from being the most devastating in history, as the outbreak between 2014 and 2016 claimed the lives of over 11,000 people across Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. However, there is no direct cure for the virus, so tracing, quarantining, and slowing the spread is of utmost importance.