Health Minister Roger Kamba told a news conference that a boat travelling from Kisangani, in the outbreak affected Tshopo province, was intercepted at Bende Bende, near Maluku port, roughly 65 kilometres from central Kinshasa. Reuters reported that the vessel was carrying about 200 people.
The alert began after a 32 year old man disembarked earlier at Pimu, a health zone in Mongala province, more than 550 kilometres downstream. Kamba said the man developed fever and diarrhoea before he died on 25 July, with symptoms consistent with Ebola.
Reuters cited a Mongala provincial health ministry report showing no biological sample was collected at the time, because the local health facility lacked testing kits. That gap has left the case unconfirmed, even as it triggered a nationwide response.
Government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya said teams from the National Institute of Biomedical Research were mobilised to carry out Ebola and cholera screening on everyone aboard, crew included. Xinhua reported that a security and health cordon was placed around the boat while the mobile laboratory worked through the passenger list. Officials said the Ebola and cholera screening process was designed to run passenger by passenger, so nobody could disembark before their result came back.
The International Organisation for Migration identified the vessel as the Yingfeng 2 and said it arrived at the Bende Bende port in Maluku municipality, on the eastern edge of Kinshasa. The agency said it was supporting the National Border Health Programme and government authorities as the screening continued.
Kamba used the briefing to push back on unverified claims circulating online. He denied reports of six or seven deaths aboard the boat and stressed that Pimu sits in Mongala province, not in Kinshasa itself, as some social media posts had suggested.
A second concern has run alongside the Ebola alert. AllAfrica reported that another boat, arriving from Équateur province, was linked to a suspected cholera death and would also need Ebola and cholera screening once it reached the capital. Congolese authorities have treated both cases as part of the same river borne response, given how closely the two provinces feed passenger traffic into Kinshasa.
The World Health Organisation confirmed it deployed personnel to Maluku port to support the government led control operations, according to AllAfrica’s reporting from the scene. Kinshasa itself, a city of more than 17 million people, is not among the five provinces currently recording confirmed Ebola cases.
The screening comes as the wider outbreak continues to accelerate. Xinhua reported that the Democratic Republic of Congo has recorded 3,973 confirmed cases since the outbreak was declared on 15 May, including 1,801 deaths and 776 recoveries. The figures make it the largest Ebola outbreak in the country’s history and the second largest ever recorded worldwide.
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, speaking during a visit to Kinshasa, said the outbreak was spreading faster than the response could scale up, with new cases doubling in some hotspots within a single week. He called for efforts to reach every affected community despite ongoing insecurity in parts of the east.
The outbreak has been attributed to the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus, for which no licensed vaccine or specific treatment currently exists. That absence has placed added weight on Ebola and cholera screening and contact tracing as the main tools available to contain further spread.
For residents of Kinshasa, officials have repeated calls for calm rather than panic. Authorities say the Ebola and cholera screening under way at Maluku is a precaution built to catch suspected cases early, trace recent contacts and release cleared passengers in stages, rather than a sign that the virus has already reached the capital. The government has indicated that Ebola and cholera screening at river ports leading into the capital will remain in place for as long as the wider outbreak continues.
