Tests “confirm a new positive case” in Kabare territory in South Kivu, M23 spokesman Lawrence Kanyuka said in a statement.
The case involved a “person coming from Kisangani”, a major city in the eastern Tshopo province where no Ebola infections from the current outbreak have so far been recorded.
The outbreak’s epicentre is in northeastern Ituri province, with many cases in hard-to-access areas plagued by the Congolese east’s litany of armed groups, and where measures to respond to the crisis have been slow to get off the ground.
Desire Grodya, an official at a site for displaced people in Kigonze on the outskirts of Bunia, Ituri’s provincial capital, said: “We have no sanitary facilities at all, not even a handwashing station, for 16,000 displaced people.
“We’re really crammed in here; it’s total overcrowding … If the outbreak starts on the site, it will be catastrophic.”
This week, a brief riot erupted at the hospital in Rwampara, one of the outbreak’s focal points located about 12 kilometres from Bunia.
Young people who “wanted to retrieve the body” of a deceased patient “entered the hospital and burned down the two isolation tents”, a hospital official told AFP.
A healthcare worker was also injured by stone-throwing before law enforcement intervened, the official said.
The isolation tents had only just been put up at the hospital.
The outbreak comes at a time when humanitarian organisations have seen their budgets slashed, particularly as a result of US aid spending cuts under President Donald Trump.
Cases have also been recorded in North Kivu province and neighbouring Uganda, where one person has died.
A US citizen who contracted Ebola while working in the DRC is currently in hospital in Germany.
While the WHO believes the risk from the Ebola outbreak is high both in the DRC and the wider central African region, it considers the risk of a worldwide pandemic to be “low”.
– AFP