Ebola Outbreak in DRC and Uganda: Global Health Response Lagging

Quite abruptly, the world has jolted into another infectious-disease crisis. On Friday, Africa CDC confirmed a new Ebola outbreak, centered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; within two days, the World Health Organization declared the epidemic a public-health emergency of international concern. The virus, which has also spread to Uganda, is suspected to have sickened more than 500 people and killed more than 130—counts that suggest to experts that it has been spreading largely undetected in the region for several weeks, if not months. Central and West Africa have weathered dozens of Ebola outbreaks before. But this new epidemic has already surpassed most others in size, and “my projection is that it will get worse before it gets better,” Nahid Bhadelia, the director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, told us. The global-health backdrop is simply different in 2026, largely the result of a series of public-health decisions made by the United States in the past year and a half—among them, dismantling USAID, withdrawing from the WHO, and ousting infectious-disease experts en masse from the CDC, which remains without a permanent director. As things stand, the outbreak has already reached a point at which experts feel certain it will be very difficult to contain. The world’s fractured global-health community is now playing a lethal game of catch-up with an extremely dangerous virus. Experts suspect that a number of epidemiological factors helped the crisis quickly swell in size, mostly under the radar. The outbreak so far centers on two mining towns—Mongbwalu and Rwampara—in a region of the DRC where access to health care is inconsistent and traffic in and out is high. During a press conference on Saturday, Jean Kaseya, the director general of Africa CDC, described the area as “very vulnerable and fragile.” Relatively remote regions with high mobility and porous borders can be ideal settings for viruses to spread unnoticed, especially for pathogens such as Ebola, whose early symptoms can resemble those of typhoid and malaria, also endemic to the region. Those parts of the DRC have been plagued by civil unrest and intense armed conflict, raising substantial barriers for sick people to seek care and access tests, Krutika Kuppalli, a Dallas-based infectious-disease physician who ran an Ebola treatment unit in 2014, told us.