ITURI PROVINCE — Authorities in Ituri province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo are contending with a new Ebola outbreak suspected in at least 246 cases, including 65 deaths, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday. The agency reported that of 20 samples tested so far, 13 were confirmed positive.

The outbreak is the 17th in the Congo since 1976. A separate Ebola outbreak between 2014 and 2016 killed more than 11,000 people.

The latest outbreak is believed to be caused by the Bundibugyo ebolavirus strain, which previously caused two known outbreaks: one in Uganda in 2007 with 55 cases and one in the Congo in 2012 with 57 cases. There are no approved vaccines or treatments for the Bundibugyo strain.

"Medical professionals seem very concerned about the possibility or the ability to contain this. And this is a strain of Ebola for which we have no treatment, no vaccines," said Dr. Céline Gounder, a medical correspondent.

Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room physician and public health professor at Brown University, said health workers face elevated risk in the current outbreak. "Healthcare workers are the group that I'm really concerned about because they had very close contact with people when they're most contagious, particularly around the time of folks' death," he said.

Spencer said he believes there may be a connection between the shutdown of USAID and the delay in officially announcing the latest outbreak until Friday. The United States has been the single largest external player in Ebola outbreak response in the past. "Before the second Trump administration, USAID would have been on the ground. The CDC would have been on the ground at a moment's notice, maybe even before a moment's notice of a new outbreak of Ebola because we were in a bunch of countries. We created relationships beforehand," he said.

Dr. Abdi Rahman Mahamud, director of health emergency alert and response operations at the World Health Organization, pointed to regional conditions. "What we know very well that the country has experience, but the region where it is happening is highly volatile with the humanitarian situation going on and the population moving around from South Sudan to Uganda and other parts," he said.