More than 80 people are confirmed dead amid an outbreak of Ebola in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has now spread to neighboring Uganda. The World Health Organization over the weekend declared the epidemic to be a public health emergency of international concern, a formal designation that is meant to spur action by local and regional health authorities, as well as international donors. Previous Ebola outbreaks, in West Africa in 2014 and in Congo in 2019, also received that label. |
Health authorities say the current string of cases is being caused by the Bundibugyo virus, a rare variant of Ebola with a fatality rate of 25 to 40 percent, and for which there is no approved treatment or vaccine. And because the first known patient died weeks ago, on April 24, questions are being raised about the delayed response time and about whether cuts to humanitarian aid funding by the U.S. and other countries contributed to missteps along the way. |
The outbreak has been traced back to the town of Mongbwalu, in Congo’s northeastern Ituri province, a conflict-torn area that borders Uganda and South Sudan. After a 45-year-old nurse died from what locals believed was a “mystical illness,” a traditional open-casket funeral procession was held, during which mourners came into contact with the nurse’s remains. That likely caused the virus, which is transmitted through contact with infected bodily fluids, to explode. |
According to the latest reporting from Reuters, the subsequent response by health workers was riddled with errors. Local health officials sent samples to a lab in Bunia, Ituri’s capital, where the only tests available were designed for the more common Zaire strain of Ebola rather than Bundibugyo. |
Once the tests came back negative, the samples were set aside when they should have been immediately sent along to labs in Kinshasa and in nearby Goma for further testing. By the time they reached a lab in Kinshasa, they had been handled improperly and kept at a much higher temperature than they should have been. |
All of this contributed to what WHO officials reportedly called a “critical four-week detection gap.” As a result, experts say the total number of cases and fatalities is likely much higher than what’s been publicly documented. |
Local authorities have also pointed to recent cuts to international aid as a major factor in the outbreak. The Congolese health system had long been highly dependent on assistance from overseas: In 2023 alone, the country received around $1 billion from the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development, more than 80 percent of which went to health and humanitarian initiatives, Congolese researcher Jacques Mukena wrote last year. |
President Donald Trump’s dismantling of USAID and steep cuts to other international organizations thus left a vacuum in health funding that hasn’t been filled. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and former USAID official, pointed out in a post on X that USAID and the Centers for Disease Control previously worked in Congo to strengthen disease surveillance, which had cut the detection time for major outbreaks to under 48 hours. |
“That’s now gone. This is the result,” Gawande wrote, referring to the latest Ebola epidemic. |
Those same aid cuts will also hamper local health workers as they try to contain the virus’s spread. “Certain activities previously received budgetary support from donors, notably the provision of PPE kits to healthcare facilities,” Lieven Bangali, senior health coordinator for the International Rescue Committee in Congo, told Reuters. |
“Today, Ituri serves as a case in point, with virtually no PPE kits available.” |