New Ebola outbreak fuels mounting global alarm as U.S. works to relocate affected Americans – NBC News

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There was increasing global alarm Monday over an Ebola virus outbreak in central Africa that the World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency of international concern.
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More than 300 suspected cases and 88 suspected deaths have so far been reported, primarily in Congo but also in neighboring Uganda.
The WHO says the risk of the outbreak causing a pandemic is extremely low, but that it nonetheless poses significant risk to the surrounding region.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement Sunday that a “small number of Americans who are directly affected by this outbreak” were being withdrawn from the area.
The outbreak has been identified as a rare type of Ebola caused by the Bundibugyo virus. Spread by bodily fluids, Ebola is highly contagious and often fatal — killing between 30% and 50% of those it infects — and causing symptoms such as fever, rash and vomiting, the WHO said.
Unlike regular Ebola, Bundibugyo has no approved vaccine or treatment.
What concerns health officials and experts about this particular outbreak is that it was detected late.
Most cases are in Congo’s eastern Ituri province but it has since been found some 600 miles away in the capital, Kinshasa, and in neighboring Uganda, meaning officials do not have a clear idea of how far it might have spread.
Congo closed its land border with Rwanda on Sunday, the State Department said in a post on X.
“There are significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated with this event at the present time,” the WHO said in a statement Sunday.
It also warns that it will be difficult to fight the spread in a region that has recently seen conflict between the Congolese government and the rebel group M23, whose captured city of Goma has also confirmed one case, its local administration said.
Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa CDC, told British broadcaster Sky News on Sunday that he was in “panic mode” due to a lack of medicines and vaccines as deaths rise.
The WHO’s emergency declaration means it is supporting governments and agencies’ attempts to combat the spread. Its regional office for Africa said Sunday on X that a team of 35 experts from the WHO and the Congolese Health Ministry had arrived in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province, along with 7 tons of emergency medical supplies and equipment.
The U.S. government is helping with “surveillance, laboratory diagnostics, infection prevention and control, and other outbreak containment efforts,” the CDC said Sunday.
In a call with journalists, the CDC’s Ebola response manager Satish Pillai declined to answer repeated questions about the affected Americans, saying only that it was “assessing the needs on the ground.”
Meanwhile, the charity Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medicines Sans Frontiers, said it was “preparing to rapidly scale up our medical response” in the region.
“The number of cases and deaths we are seeing in such a short timeframe, combined with the spread across several health zones and now across the border, is extremely concerning,” Trish Newport, MSF emergency program manager, said in a statement.
“This is a scary one,” wrote Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the Covid-19 response at the now dismantled United States Agency for International Development.
Konyndyk, now president of Refugees International, said on X that during the mass Ebola outbreak of 2014-16, the largest in history with 28,000 cases, “USAID and CDC, supported by the US military, led the international response.”
But now ”most of the international infrastructure that we relied on in past outbreaks…has been DOGE-d,” he added, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, which oversaw sweeping cuts to USAID and other agencies.
“USAID is gone and CDC is decimated,” he said.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the concerns expressed by former USAID officials that those cuts will hamper the U.S. response.
State also did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on the status and number of Americans affected by the outbreak.
The U.S.is working with Congo and Uganda “to rapidly contain the virus,” a State Department spokesperson said, adding that the department was “working to rapidly mobilize support to key implementing partners.”
Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.
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