BUNIA, June 9 -- The number on a whiteboard at the WHO field office in Bunia keeps climbing. As of Monday, it read 550. That is the confirmed case count in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone - 550 people with laboratory-confirmed Ebola, 101 of them dead, and the man who has been watching that number change for fifteen consecutive days told the United Nations on Tuesday that the effort to contain it is not keeping pace.

Abdirahman Mahamud, the director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergency Alert and Response Operations department, spoke to reporters at the UN's Geneva office via video link from Bunia - the provincial capital of Ituri, which accounts for 94 percent of all confirmed DRC cases. He was careful not to cat...