JONATHAN M. METSCH, Dr.P.H. – Tracking Emerging Public Health Challenges – May 19. 2026 – Ebola
“The CDC is working with the State Department to move these individuals to Germany for monitoring and treatment. “Given the previous experience with caring for Ebola patients, coupled with the flight times being significantly shorter, this allows us to get these persons to points of care quickly,” said CDC Ebola response incident manager Satish Pillai in the call.
Pillai also said the agency was surging technical and field experts requested by the DRC, beyond the 25 or so staff members in the CDC DRC Country Office. “Anything that the country office and the Ministry [of Health] is requesting for support, we will be providing,” he said.
But cuts made by the Trump Administration to U.S. domestic and international health agencies raises questions about whether the U.S. is continuing to support disease surveillance across DRC.
“The U.S. invested in disease surveillance capacity in Congo because it is such a hotbed of known novel outbreak risks,” says Konyndyk. “That disease detection surveillance architecture has been badly weakened.”
“That relatively late-in-the-game notification struck Demetre Daskalakis, a former high-ranking official at CDC. “We used to be like the first or second call for many of these things,” he says. “Though I’m not on the ground at the DRC to tell you what happened, it does seem weird that we accrued a couple 100 cases of this before CDC got any inkling of information.”
On the press call, Pillai said the difficult conditions of the outbreak’s epicenter likely account for the delay. Cases are concentrated in the Ituri province of northeastern DRC, a mining area experiencing ongoing conflict.
In the past, humanitarian programs operating in such areas have acted as informal disease surveillance networks.”” (1)
“The number of people infected by Ebola in central Africa could be much higher than reported and the outbreak could last for months, global health officials warned on Tuesday.”
“A model of the outbreak published on Monday by the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, at Imperial College in London, found that the current number of cases could be well over 1,000.
“Our analyses suggest that the true number of cases may be substantially higher than those confirmed to date,” said Dr. Anne Cori, an associate professor in infectious disease modeling.
Dr. Ancia said that W.H.O. officials had been in Bunia since Sunday and that while medical equipment, disinfectant and protective gear had arrived, it was not enough. “We need more people, more hands on the ground,” she said.
Moving equipment to the region became more difficult after rebels took over the city of Goma, home to the region’s main airport, she said.
Dr. Tedros said the deaths of health care workers and the absence of vaccines or therapeutics to treat the Bundibugyo species raised fears that the outbreak would spread further. Cases have already been reported in urban areas, including in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and in Goma.” (2)
““The last outbreak in this area took two years,” to contain, Dr. Anne Ancia, a representative for the World Health Organization in Congo, said in a phone interview from Bunia, the capital of Ituri Province, where the first cases were identified.
“We hope it won’t be that long, but I’m foreseeing several months,” she said.”” (3)
“There are two critical questions about timing: When did this outbreak actually start? And why did public health officials detect it so late?
“The species of Ebola that’s spreading is partly to blame for the delay. It’s called Bundibugyo, and it’s relatively rare, with a genetic sequence that’s about 30% different than Ebola virus species that typically cause outbreaks, says Titanji. That also means there are no approved vaccines or treatments.
“Some of the initial testing that was done didn’t pick up this Bundibugyo virus,” she says, since those tests were designed for more common versions of Ebola. As a result, samples had to be sent to more specialized testing centers. That can take time, especially in this region of DRC, where ongoing conflict and difficult travel conditions can delay shipments.”
“And there’s another key question to consider: Has the U.S., which has traditionally been a key player in emerging outbreaks, been hampered in its response by its withdrawal from the World Health Organization?”
In a statement to NPR, the State Department said “It is false to claim that the USAID reform has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ebola,” adding that funding and support to combat Ebola would continue.
Other moves by the Trump administration are having an impact, say the disease doctors. A shrinking budget at the World Health Organization – most notably because of the administration’s withdrawal from the U.S. body – have reduced the size of WHO’s international emergency division…” (4)
“President Donald Trump on Monday said he was concerned about Ebola after an American tested positive for it.
“I’m concerned about everything, but certainly [I] am,” Trump said when asked about Ebola during a White House event on his administration’s consumer-drug website TrumpRx.
“I think that it’s been confined right now to Africa, and but it’s something that has had a breakout,” he said of the disease.” (5)
“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.” (6)
“Congo will open three Ebola treatment centers in the eastern Ituri province, and the World Health Organization is sending a team of experts to the country, following an outbreak of a rare type of the virus that has killed nearly 120 people.” (7)
“The State Department also said in a statement on Tuesday that the U.S. is going to fund up to 50 Ebola response clinics.
“The United States is committing to rapidly supporting the Ebola outbreak response by funding up to 50 treatment clinics, and associated frontline costs being established in Ebola-affected regions of the DRC and Uganda” the State Department said.
“This U.S. funding commitment will accelerate the delivery of frontline medical care, life-saving humanitarian assistance, and critical outbreak response capabilities to communities at greatest risk,” it added.” (8)
1.This Ebola outbreak raises questions about when it all began — and the U.S. response, By Jonathan Lambert and Pien Huang, https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/g-s1-122655/ebola-outbreak-democratic-republic-congo-uganda
2.Ebola Outbreak in Central Africa Could Last Months, W.H.O. Says, By Lynsey ChutelYan Zhuang and Ephrat Livni, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-deaths-congo-who.html
3.Ebola Outbreak in Central Africa Could Last Months, W.H.O. Says, By Lynsey Chutel, Yan Zhuang and Ephrat Livni, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-deaths-congo-who.html
4.This Ebola outbreak raises questions about when it all began — and the U.S. response, Jonathan Lambert and Pien Huang, https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/g-s1-122655/ebola-outbreak-democratic-republic-congo-uganda
5.Trump says he’s ‘concerned’ about Ebola after American tests positive in Africa, by Kevin Breuninger, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/trump-ebola-virus-concerned-africa.html
6.This Ebola Outbreak Will Be Hard to Contain, By Katherine J. Wu and Hana Kiros, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/05/ebola-outbreak/687216/
7.Congo opens more centers to treat rare type of Ebola that has killed nearly 120, By JEAN-YVES KAMALE, MONIKA PRONCZUK and WILSON MCMAKIN, https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-305bf410419bdb1311020b72111c12e7
8.United States to Fund Establishment of Up to 50 Ebola Response Clinics, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/05/united-states-to-fund-establishment-of-up-to-50-ebola-response-clinics/
curated by Jonathan M. Metsch, Dr.P.H.
Clinical Professor of Environmental Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai