Ebola virus outbreak in Congo kills 31 A tradition of washing and displaying corpses before funerals spreads the Ebola virus. A deadly outbreak of the Ebola virus has killed 31 people in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than doubling the death toll from a week ago, the UN health agency said. There were 69 cases in all, including nine confirmed by a laboratory, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday. Five of the deaths had been confirmed by laboratory work. The Ebola virus has no cure and is deadly in 40-90% of cases. The disease causes severe internal bleeding. "The situation is serious," Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based agency, told reporters. She said it was unusual that the first person to be infected was a health worker. Normally someone working outside would have been the first. This was mostly the case in the eight previous Ebola epidemics in Congo since the first discovery of it in 1976. The current outbreak is the first in the Haut-Uele territory, in north-eastern Congo. Authorities reported last week that 15 people had died in north-eastern Congo, where the tradition of washing and displaying corpses before funerals spreads the epidemic. The tradition is intended to show love and respect for the deceased, but the practice also brings people into close contact with victims of the virus. Aid group Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières), along with the WHO and Congo's health ministry, have been conducting education campaigns in the area to warn people of the risks linked to this practice. MSF is also managing two quarantine centres in Isiro and Viadana and the UN has called for the creation of a $2m (£1.25m) fund to fight the epidemic.