The Democratic Republic of the Congo has launched an Ebola vaccination programme in a bid to stop the latest outbreak of the deadly viral disease from spreading.

The first wave of immunisations targetted healthcare staff in the northwest of the country who have had direct or indirect contact with infected patients, the DRC government said on Monday.

Alarm bells sounded last week after the outbreak, previously reported in a remote rural area of the country, notched up its first confirmed case in Mbandaka, a city of 1.2 million people, where three subsequent cases have been confirmed.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has dispatched 35 immunisation experts, including 16 mobilised during the last deadly outbreak in West Africa, which began in 2013. The rest of the team is made up of newly trained staff from the DRC.

More than 7,500 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine have been deployed in the effort, which is being funded by a variety of international organisations.

"Vaccination will be key to controlling this outbreak,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said in a statement on Monday.

A DRC government spokesperson said that additional donors had promised 300,000 doses of the vaccine, around 5,400 of which have already been received.

Along with frontline healthcare workers, family members and others who may have come in contact with the disease, including laboratory workers, surveillance teams and people responsible for burials will also receive the vaccine.

The programme attempts to control an outbreak by vaccinating and monitoring a ring of people around each infected individual.

Teams in the DRC are searching for those who may require the vaccine, with more than 600 people having been identified so far.

While the vaccine is yet to be licensed, the WHO has secured special permissions to use it in response to this outbreak.