Data released by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday showed that the number of confirmed Ebola cases has risen to 2,473, including 999 deaths.

The Congo Public Health Institute said in its latest report that 50 new cases were detected on Monday in the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu in the east of the country, according to Reuters news agency.

The tally in neighboring Uganda remained stable at two deaths and 20 infections, after authorities confirmed last week that the country was free of any active infections, according to the WHO report dated July 20. Over the past 50 years, Ebola has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa, according to Agence France-Presse.

The World Health Organization had announced the start of clinical trials on two treatments against the recent rare strain of the virus, and also granted emergency use authorization for the first molecular diagnostic test to detect it.

Last week, the organization also announced the launch of the first trial to evaluate the safety of the ChAdOx1 vaccine, led by the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

For his part, the WHO's Ebola response manager in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tierno Baldé, warned during a press conference on Tuesday in Geneva that the epidemic 'is still one step ahead of us, and we are still in a phase where we are trying to keep up with its developments.'