This Ebola Outbreak Will Be Hard to Contain

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The world is already playing catch-up to a new Ebola outbreak. I'm Hana Khan an assistant editor at The Atlantic and my colleague Katie Woo and I wrote about the Ebola outbreak that is centered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

[00:00:11][music] The outbreak was only recently discovered but it spread widely due to a number of factors. [music] One, it's centered on two mining towns that have inconsistent access to health care. The area has high traffic in and high traffic out which helps the virus spread and the region is full of warring armed groups which makes finding treatment and [music] accessing health care a lot more challenging. With Ebola outbreaks in the past including the record breaking one in 2014, the US and the CDC in collaboration with the World Health Organization [music] played a really instrumental role in early detection and containment. But the Trump administration's early freezes on foreign aid funding compromised the DRC's ability to deliver medicine to rural clinics. The US's sudden major cuts to foreign aid funding to the DRC have also severely restricted local health care delivery. And in March the US allowed funding to lapse to one foreign aid program that was providing vital emergency health support to the region where the outbreak is occurring.

[00:01:08]While the US did agree to provide some outbreak funding earlier this year, its withdrawal from the World Health Organization means that the organization has lost its largest funder and one of its major partners in responding to global health crises shrinking the WHO's capacity to respond to any crisis. Ebola is very unforgiving Tom Frieden a former CDC director told us. The response has to be close to perfect. To begin the response this late means that the epidemic will be that much harder to contain.