The Ebola virus has reached the Congolese city of Goma, a major transit hub that is home to more than 1 million people on the Rwandan border.
It was confirmed that a pastor tested positive for the virus after arriving at a centre in Goma after travelling there by bus on Sunday 14 July.
The Goma patient is a Christian pastor who had preached at a church in another town, Butembo, where he would have touched worshippers "including the sick", the health ministry said Sunday.
World Health Organization emergencies chief Mike Ryan said they had identified 60 contacts, including 18 who were on the bus with the priest, and half of them have been vaccinated.
North Kivu province's outbreak since previous year had also seen 700 people cured, and more than 160,000 vaccinated, according to DR Congo's Health Ministry.
The Ebola outbreak has killed almost 1,700 people in Congo and two others who returned home to Uganda while sick.
Meanwhile, last week the Ministry reported that it had enough vaccines rVSV-ZEBOV, an experimental treatment of the German Merck laboratory, with which nearly 160 thousand people were already immunized.
Yet, despite these exhaustive preventative and treatment efforts, fighting Ebola has proved hard because of community mistrust, limited health care resources, difficult-to-access locations, and violent attacks on heath care workers.
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Bianca was known online as an "e-girl" and had built up a small following across her two Instagram accounts, @escty and @beegtfo. As news of the attack reached the press, hysteria ensued and a variety of conflicting stories began to surface.
It would then spread with out warning, via contact with even little amounts of bodily fluid of these contaminated - or indirectly via contact with base environments.
The health ministries in Congo's neighbours have been preparing for months for the possibility of cases, and frontline health workers already have been vaccinated.
Health officials will move the patient back to Butembo for treatment.
Goma shares border with Rwanda, with an estimated 100,000 people crossing the border from either country daily for various businesses, according to migration officials. He was cared for by a nurse until he left by bus for Goma on Friday.
"We are dealing with the 60 contacts we have now", he said. Since November, more than 3,000 health workers in Goma have been vaccinated for Ebola and trained in the detection and management of Ebola patients. Current, the World Health Organization has documented 2,477 cases of Ebola and 1,655 deaths.
It will be attended by government ministers from the DR Congo and Britain, senior officials of the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and other United Nations agencies.
The case was worrying, said Djingarey, because Goma - near Congo's border with Rwanda - was "the door of this region to the rest of world".
An epidemic between 2013 and 2016 killed more than 11,300 people in West Africa. The WHO has recorded at least 198 attacks on health facilities and health workers in the region since January.
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