Congo’s Ebola outbreak slows at epicentre but widens elsewhere, modelling suggests

The growth in cases had started to ease in Ituri, but had only plateaued in North Kivu province and was accelerating in Haut-Uélé.

Overall, the “outbreak’s footprint keeps growing, threatening [to] spread along the Congo river, even as weekly activity seems to ease”.

The firm’s forecasts give a 50 per cent chance of the outbreak hitting 50,000 cases – double the size of the 2014 West Africa outbreak.

The US Centres for Disease Control said on Tuesday that efforts to contain the ebolavirus “remained below established response targets” and the fast expansion of the disease across many health zones indicated “uncontrolled expansion of the outbreak.”

Epidemiologists are particularly worried about the proportion of deaths among people who are not in hospital and who have not already been traced as vulnerable contacts to other cases.

The number of such cases and deaths said to be “occurring outside known transmission chains” shows that the relief effort has yet to trace and get a grip of how the virus is spreading.

“Until every chain is found and broken, the epidemic will continue and will continue to pose a threat to DRC, its neighbours and the region as a whole,” the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said this week in Geneva.

The UK Government this week said it would spend another £51.8 million on the Ebola response, taking total UK funding to £78.7 million.

Health officials have meanwhile begun using anonymised mobile phone data to map population movements in disease hotspots, giving an indication of where the infection may spread next.