On Monday, dozens of staff at the Ebola treatment center inside Rwampara general hospital in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo walked off the job over unpaid salaries and bonuses, shutting the hospital, blocking the access road, and burning tires at the main gate [1]. The same day, workers at a second center in Ituri province -- the outbreak's epicenter -- closed their facility and barricaded it. The people paid to stop the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record had gone weeks doing risky crisis work for little or no money from the Congolese government, which says only that it is in talks to find a solution [1].

The count itself is now near 2,000 confirmed Bundibugyo cases and 702 deaths, with suspected spread into two more provinces, one of them Kisangani, among Congo's largest cities [1]. When the paper last covered the region, in its report that a US aid worker had tested positive for Ebola, that was a US case of a related strain, geographically and clinically distinct from this Bundibugyo outbreak. Same virus family, separate crisis.

Bundibugyo has no approved vaccine or treatment. A WHO-backed trial has begun enrolling patients at a single Ituri center -- not the struck one -- randomly assigning Gilead's remdesivir, Mapp Biopharmaceutical's experimental antibody MBP134, both, or neither [1]. Eighty percent of new cases trace to unknown transmission chains, WHO said Tuesday. Restricted burials have angered residents; misinformation in affected villages insists the virus is a scam. The headline number is the symptom. The strike is the story: containment fails first at the payroll.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo