Barrot, in Bunia, says France will add to the 13.4 million euros already spent on Ebola

French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on Saturday that France will increase its support for the Ebola response in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and that the virus can return quickly if vigilance drops. He said it in Bunia, the Ituri city at the centre of the outbreak, on a trip that also took him to Kinshasa.

Between January and July France allocated 13.4 million euros, about 15.1 million dollars, to the fight against Ebola. Barrot said he would propose further humanitarian funding in the coming French budget talks. A national humanitarian conference in Paris on 6 October is due to take up Ebola. The 13.4 million is the spent baseline. The new money is a proposal, not an appropriation.

The presidency of Felix Tshisekedi said after a Kinshasa meeting that Barrot had paid tribute to Congolese authorities and humanitarian workers, and that he wanted France to make a significant contribution against an epidemic that has killed nearly 4,000 people. Health minister Samuel Roger Kamba and deputy foreign minister Noella Ayeganagato sat in that meeting. Barrot called the ties between the two states long-standing. The measures Paris intends were not specified in the presidency note.

The health ministry has counted 4,018 deaths among 8,300 cases in an outbreak declared on 15 May. The virus in this outbreak is Bundibugyo, for which there is still no licensed vaccine. Ervebo, which Congo began using for front-line workers in Bunia in September, is licensed for Zaire ebolavirus, not Bundibugyo. That mismatch is the clinical fact underneath the funding request. Money can pay for isolation, safe burial, contact tracing and staff. It cannot yet buy a matched vaccine.

Barrot's trip is unusual for a Western foreign minister this year. He also noted a laboratory-confirmed mpox case identified in Bunia in mid-September, a second pathogen in the same city. The Ebola response has already been interrupted by violence. Soldiers burned a displacement camp at Kigonze, on the edge of Bunia, that held a transit centre for patients. About 19,000 people fled. At least 50 health workers have died in the outbreak. A funding pledge made in the city has to be read against that loss of staff and that loss of a treatment site.

Africa CDC spokesperson Wessam Mankoula said earlier in October that a fall in recorded cases may reflect weak surveillance rather than a real slowdown. If that reading is right, a French cheque that arrives after 6 October will meet an epidemic that is harder to see, not one that is over. Barrot's own line in Bunia was that distance is not protection, and that the responsibility is to prevent a resurgence.

France's existing channel is humanitarian aid, medical research, and the PRISM programme announced during President Emmanuel Macron's 2023 visit. Saturday's announcement does not replace that machinery. It adds a budget proposal and a conference date. The conference is in Paris on Tuesday. The patients are in Ituri.

The concrete test is whether the additional sum, once it has a number, is aimed at Bundibugyo surveillance and at rebuilding capacity lost at Kigonze, or whether it is folded into the 13.4 million already counted. Barrot has promised a proposal. He has not yet named the euro figure.