The World Health Organization has confirmed that the Ebola outbreak currently affecting the Democratic Republic of the Congo is killing between thirty and fifty percent of those infected, a figure that officials have described as alarming. The revised estimate, which is based on confirmed cases, was communicated by Anaïs Legand of the WHO's high threat pathogens team, who told reporters in Geneva that the scale of mortality meant that as many as five in ten patients could be expected to die. One patient is, however, reported to have recovered and been discharged from a health centre on 27 May following two negative tests, marking the first confirmed survival of the outbreak. Since the outbreak was formally declared on 15 May, the WHO has recorded ten confirmed and 223 suspected deaths among more than one thousand confirmed and suspected cases, though the true scale is believed to be considerably larger, given that the virus is thought to have circulated undetected for some time. The DRC has now experienced seventeen recorded Ebola epidemics since the disease was first identified there in 1976, and the average fatality rate across all outbreaks has historically stood at around fifty percent. Efforts to contain the disease are being complicated by the outbreak's location in the mineral-rich Ituri province of north-eastern DRC, a region that is currently contested by multiple armed groups. The WHO's director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who arrived in Kinshasa on Thursday and was due to travel to the affected area on Friday, made a direct appeal to all parties in the conflict to declare a ceasefire, arguing that no grievance could justify the deaths of civilians from a preventable disease. The humanitarian context surrounding the outbreak is further shaped by the displacement of more than 245,000 people from eastern DRC to neighbouring countries since January 2025, according to the UN refugee agency.…