This Ebola Outbreak Will Be Hard to Contain. The world is already playing catch-up to a deadly disease.
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.