The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) says at least two people are dead of Ebola in a remote region where many others have fallen sick.  And the UN World Health Organization (WHO) is backtracking its earlier claims that the deadly Congo illnesses weren’t Ebola, and were another form of haemorrhagic disease.

The WHO says its earlier statement was based on “incomplete information”.  Now, the organization will wait for further tests in DRC, which is thousands of kilometers away from the West African Ebola Outbreak that killed more than 1,427 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.  A handful of cases are also reported in Nigeria.  The West African outbreak is being caused by the Zaire strain of Ebola, the most deadly strain.

There’s some confusion about which strain of virus is in play in Congo.  The government says the samples in Congo suggest the presence of the Sudanese strain of the virus.  But one of the two samples in Congo was officially reported to contain a mixture of the Sudanese and Zaire strains.  That report is puzzling many Ebola analysts.

It’s not unprecedented for two separate outbreaks of Ebola to occur; it happened in 2012 on a much smaller scale, with only 20 deaths reported.