A case of Ebola has been confirmed in Congo’s South Kivu province, the rebel alliance that controls the area said on May 21.
The Congo River Alliance, which is known by its French name Alliance Fleuve Congo and includes Rwanda-backed rebels who seized swathes of eastern Congo in 2025, said in a statement that the 28-year-old patient had died and been buried safely.
It said the person had come from the northern city of Kisangani, in Tshopo province, but it did not provide details about their recent movements.
The Ebola outbreak started in Congo earlier this year and resulted in more than 600 suspected cases and 139 suspected deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Congo’s South Kivu province is hundreds of kilometers from the outbreak’s epicenter, in the northeast part of the central African country.
South Kivu health spokesperson Claude Bahizire said earlier Thursday that two suspected cases, including the patient who died, had been detected in the province. The other patient was in isolation awaiting test results, he said.
A case of Ebola was confirmed in Goma, the capital of neighboring North Kivu province, last week.
The March 23 Movement (M23), an armed group that holds Goma and the South Kivu province, has said it was committed to working with international partners to contain the outbreak.
The U.S.- and UN-sanctioned group has a long history of destabilizing North Kivu province and perpetrating human rights abuses, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said in a July 2025 statement.
The WHO on May 17 declared a public health emergency of international concern, in part because officials said there were “significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated” with the outbreak.
The risk of the outbreak is high nationally and regionally but low globally, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing this week.
The risk of Ebola spreading to the United States is low “because Ebola is not spread through casual contact and because monitoring and infection control measures are in place,” Dr. Satish Pillai, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s manager for Ebola response, told a briefing on May 20.
An American doctor who was in Congo and contracted Ebola was flown to Germany for treatment, and other Americans exposed to Ebola, who are asymptomatic, were transported to hospitals in Germany and the Czech Republic for monitoring.
The outbreak is being caused by the Bundibugyo virus, one of the orthoebolaviruses that cause Ebola. There are no vaccines or approved treatments for the Bundibugyo virus.
Officials said this week that work is underway on vaccines and therapeutics.
Dr. Samuel Kamba, Congo’s health minister, said during a press conference on April 19 that the country has experience dealing with outbreaks without vaccines or treatments, but that Congo still needs help because “the virus knows no borders, no race, no tribe, and nothing at all.”
Reuters contributed to this report.