THE fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded is leaving thousands more people hungry in eastern Congo, a region engulfed in conflicts and a fight over precious minerals, the head of the United Nations food agency warned on Wednesday.

During a visit to the hard-hit Ituri province, the World Food Programme’s (WFP) acting executive director, Carl Skau, said the outbreak is a “crisis on top of a crisis” that has compounded a catastrophic situation with over five million Congolese already experiencing emergency-level food insecurity.

The long-running conflict in eastern Congo has driven nearly 10 million people into crisis or emergency levels of hunger, with Ituri, the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak, among the most affected, with 1.9 million in need of food, according to the WFP.

Mr Skau told a video news conference: “My number one message is that this situation requires much, much more attention.

“This is the fastest-growing Ebola crisis ever.”

Since the outbreak was declared on May 15, it took just over two months for 1,000 people to die of Ebola in eastern Congo, compared to the 2014-16 outbreak in west Africa that had been considered the worst in history and when it took about eight months to reach that number.

The dramatic surge shows the urgent need to scale up food, protective equipment, trained staff and funding, Mr Skau said, stressing that the lack of money has forced WFP to cut the number of people it is assisting in Congo from three million last year to one million this year.

UN senior Ebola co-ordinator Julien Harneis, who was with Mr Skau on the visit to Ituri, said the $2.1 billion (£1.6bn) humanitarian appeal for Congo is only 45 per cent funded.

The outbreak has been particularly difficult to fight because the Bundibugyo virus responsible for it has no approved vaccines or treatments, unlike most of Congo’s past outbreaks.