Health officials in the DR Congo added four more to the Ebola outbreak death toll, with 49 lives lost.  But they ominously said that more than 2,000 people may have come into contact with the deadly virus.

Since the current outbreak began on 1 August in North Kivu province, the health ministry says 63 infections were confirmed through laboratory tests on samples taken from patients.  Another 27 are considered probable because they involve sick people who have not been tested, but have with a close epidemiological link to confirmed cases.  At least ten health-care workers have been infected.

Of the 49 deaths, 39 were recorded in a particularly hard-hit agricultural village called Mangina.  One was a health care worker.

But health ministry field teams were able to identify 2,157 people who may have been in contact with the virus, leading to fears that this outbreak is spreading faster than the health ministry can contain it.

"We do not know if all the chains of transmission have been identified," said UN World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevi, who added that WHO "expects more cases".

Despite the Ebola virus being discovered in the DR Congo in 1976, nine more outbreaks in the country since then, and the virus being named after one of the country's rivers, the DRC government seemed unprepared for this outbreak.

"There's an extremely low level of knowledge and awareness about Ebola in the area," said WHO epidemiologist Peter Salama.  "Early on, the health care workers took no precautions whatsoever, and unfortunately, we're expecting more confirmed cases from that group.

"It's taking all the partners a little longer to get moving in this outbreak to be at the scale required to really deal with what is one of the more complex outbreaks of Ebola we've had in recent years," said Salama, "This is a really tough one."