I’m no stranger to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Over the years I’ve made numerous visits to this vast and tantalising country the citizens of which for a seemingly interminable period of time, have been subjected to some of the worst hardships, humanitarian crises and horrors imaginable.

On those many trips to the country’s remote parts, I’ve watched the poorest hack the coltan and cobalt from the ground, needed to keep our digital gizmos and batteries working here in the comparatively wealthy developed world.

I’ve seen Congolese children wading waist deep in water, torches taped to their foreheads or held between their teeth as they enter the darkness of old and now illegal goldmines.

There for hours every day in the inky blackness they dig and pan for the precious metal, much of which ends up funding militias and predatory gunmen that only in turn make the lives of ordinary people more precarious.

Despite the country's vast natural resources, two million children are at risk of starvation and 4.5 million people have fled their homes because of recent fighting.

Conflict, hunger, poverty, displacement have become virtual bywords for DRC. So much so that the nation’s government recently boycotted its own donor conference in Geneva on the grounds that the UN and humanitarian community were propagating a “bad image of DRC throughout the world”.

Such a response of course does make DRC’s massive problems go away, the latest of which has been an outbreak of the Ebola virus in the northwest city of Mbandaka.

Just yesterday the World Health Organisation (WHO) raised the Ebola health risk assessment to “very high” ahead of an emergency meeting to discuss the worsening presence of the disease.

Concerns about its spread have escalated after reports of a rising number of confirmed cases in Mbandakaa city of 1 million people, raising the prospect of a wider outbreak than feared.

WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said yesterday that Congo’s Ministry of Health had provided updated figures: 45 cases overall since April 4, including 14 confirmed, 10 suspected and 21 probable. There had been 25 deaths, but no new infections among health workers, said Mr Jasarevic.

Initially the outbreak was in a rural area 95 miles from Mbandaka, giving the response teams a better chance of containing it. But now cases have appeared in the city itself.

Another Ebola outbreak is the last thing sub-Saharan Africa needs. Even now the impact of the West African epidemic of the virus between 2013- 2016 still resonates in the region and beyond. It was only in March of 2016 that the WHO terminated the state of public health emergency status of that last outbreak, and people are still picking up the pieces of their lives today.

For DRC itself it’s another blow and one that will place even greater pressure on the already limited resources it has at its disposal without substantial intervention by the international community.

Nothing about DRC either in terms of the country’s physical scale or that of its myriad problems is anything short of enormous.

At least 13 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance according to the UN. This is a need up there on a par with Syria and Yemen and has been like this for years now. These humanitarian needs largely caused by conflict, have doubled over the past year alone. In huge parts of the country, especially the east civilians are confronted daily by massacres, persistent and recurring displacement, rape, kidnappings, human trafficking, house burning and a proliferation of foreign and local armed groups.

The latest Ebola crises is certainly going to add to DRC’s problems, and every measure necessary will no doubt be brought to bear to contain the spread of the disease. But it’s important too that there is not the same disproportionate alarmist emphasis placed on the current situation as reared its head in the 2013-2016 outbreak.

Despite the fact that Ebola affected only five out of 54 countries across Africa, that disproportionately alarmist response last time around did the continent a great disservice in the longer term. Shortly after the end of that last Ebola outbreak in West Africa two years ago, I interviewed Professor Peter Piot, the Belgian microbiologist who helped discover the Ebola virus in 1976.

Now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor Piot was at pains to point out that Ebola had not gone away and that it was vital to maintain every possible safeguard and measure against the return of the disease. Equally however he warned against allowing the disease’s existence in Africa to inhibit all the progress and positive things happening across the continent.

“Africa has lots of possibilities it’s the cradle of mankind a source of inspiration, creativity and richness and we should never forget that despite the challenges the continent continues to present,” he told me.

DRC knows all about those challenges. What this huge country has faced is one of the most complex and long lasting humanitarian crises the world has seen. For these reasons the country has seen “donor fatigue” a condition only compounded by DRC President Joseph Kabila's decision that his government would set up its own agency’ to “manage, monitor and control humanitarian funds and work to channel all financial flows affecting the humanitarian sector” in the country.

Since the boycott of the Geneva conference last month observers has warned that relations between the DRC government and international aid agencies have hit a “low point”.

Caught in the middle of course are those13 million people who are desperately in need of humanitarian support and increasingly becoming political bargaining chips, ahead of the country’s elections now slated for December.

If nothing else hears hoping the latest outbreak of Ebola may focus the minds of those on all sides. The need for cooperation between the government and international humanitarian community in DRC has never been greater.