PAKISTAN PERSPECTIVE

Islamabad, May 21, 2026. The World Health Organization's (WHO) declaration of a global health emergency over the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda did not surprise Pakistani observers of international public health. What's catching the attention of Islamabad's press is less the scale of the crisis — 88 suspected deaths and over 300 reported cases — than the cascade of failures that allowed the virus to spread for weeks without being identified.

According to information published by Dawn, two Congolese officials familiar with the response revealed to Reuters a series of errors that compromised early detection. The first known patient, a healthcare worker, died on April 24 in Bunia, the capital of Ituri Province, after showing fever, vomiting, and hemorrhaging. His death, attributed to a mysterious illness by his entourage, led to a funeral where loved ones came into direct contact with the contagious corpse. "Everyone touches it, everyone does it... and that's where the cases start to explode," said Samuel Roger Kamba, Congo's health minister.

But it's the diagnostic system's failure that's at the heart of the problem. The Bunia lab had test cartridges configured for the Zaire strain of Ebola, responsible for the 15 previous outbreaks in Congo, including the 2018-2020 outbreak that killed over 2,200 people. However, the current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain, absent from Congo since 2012, with an estimated mortality rate of 25-40% according to MSF. Without sequencing equipment, local tests came back negative — and the samples were simply set aside, without being sent to the Kinshasa labs capable of identifying other strains.

Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director of the Congolese National Institute of Biomedical Research, himself acknowledged the protocol error: "The reflex should have been to contact Kinshasa and send the samples for further investigation." Late samples sent to the capital would have been poorly preserved and poorly conditioned for transport, further delaying identification.

The WHO said it was informed of an unknown disease with high mortality in Mongbwalu on May 5, including four healthcare workers who died in four days. A former mayor of the town mentions 60 to 80 deaths on that single site, with "six, seven, eight deaths per day".