The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has warned that the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has not yet peaked.
Operations manager Bruno Michon stated Tuesday that the worst of the outbreak remains ahead and could persist for another full year.
The rare Bundibugyo virus strain has already claimed 192 lives, spreading rapidly across three provinces through highly infectious bodily fluids.
Health workers face immense peril, enduring verbal abuse, direct threats, and physical attacks while trying to conduct safe community burials.
Confronting this hostility, humanitarian teams emphasize that building local trust is a slow but life-saving prerequisite to halting transmission.
The medical charity Doctors Without Borders added that the true geographical scale and velocity of the virus remain completely unknown.
A critical lack of testing infrastructure remains one of the most significant and debilitating weaknesses in the international medical response.
Severe data fragmentation among laboratories, hospitals, and surveillance teams has further distorted the official numbers, creating deep administrative confusion.
Some mobile patients are being counted multiple times, while many others perish silently in remote villages without ever receiving care.
A senior Congolese health official disclosed that the virus likely began circulating undetected as early as February of this year.