The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is now the second-largest recorded in the 42 years since the virus was discovered, according to the UN World Health Organization (WHO).

So far, health workers have logged at least 426 confirmed or probable cases of the virus with 245 confirmed or probable deaths as as a result.  Most cases are in and around the town of Beni, in the North Kivu province along the eastern region of the DRC. 

This takes the outbreak past the number of deaths recorded in Uganda in 2000.  But it is a distant second to the West African Ebola Epidemic that ran from 2014 to 2016, killing 11,310 people mostly in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.  The current outbreak has the potential to get worse, but it would have a long way to go to catch up to that grim milestone.

Last week, the major medical journals JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine pleaded that the US government send more resources to the DRC to address the epidemic, including personnel.