Attachments
The 15th Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was declared on 22 August 2022 by the Minister of Public Health, Hygiene and Prevention. This outbreak occurred in the health zone of Beni located in the province of North Kivu in the east of the country. The declaration followed the death of a patient on 15 August 2022 at the ‘’Hôpital Général de Référence (HGR)’’ in Beni, where a swab tested positive for EVD at the Beni laboratory and was then confirmed at the INRB (Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale) laboratory in Goma. According to the country's authorities, sequencing carried out at the Rodolphe Mérieux Laboratory of INRB-Goma confirmed the Ebola Zaire strain and furthermore demonstrated that this case is linked to a strain of the tenth outbreak of 2018 in November in Beni and not to a new introduction of the virus.
The Butanuka Health Area was the epicenter of the disease. It is in the health zone of Beni, in the Province of North Kivu.
Until the proclamation of the end of the epidemic on 27 September 2022, the epidemiological situation according to the health authorities was still at 1 confirmed case, dead in Butanuka, 179 contacts of which 166 were traced.
The city of Beni has faced the third outbreak of the EVD in the last 5 years, since 2018: the 10th and longest EVD in DRC (2018 to 2020), the 13th EVD (October 2021 to May 2022) and now the 15th. As with previous EVD epidemics in the country, the DRC Red Cross contributed to the humanitarian response to this latest epidemic through an emergency action plan (EPoA) until 31 January 2023. This report therefore presents the main achievements.