Ebola and hantavirus reveal US as a major threat to global health

Ebola virus is in the headlines again this week. It’s a perennial pathogen, highly contagious and extremely deadly, and its occasional flareups could threaten a global disaster. An ongoing outbreak in the the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo last month has already racked up more than 500 cases, killing at least 130 people.

On Monday, the U.S. announced a travel ban on Uganda and the DRC, as well as Sudan, after reports that at least six Americans were exposed to the virus, plus one doctor who tested positive, started displaying symptoms and was evacuated to Germany. The disease has spilled across Congo’s borders into Uganda, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency of international concern. Though this hasn’t yet reached the scale of a pandemic, it’s essentially an alarm bell for any country that values human life.

This bad news comes on the heels of a hantavirus outbreak onboard a Dutch cruise ship earlier this month that grabbed global attention with 11 cases, three of them fatal. While both hantavirus and Ebola have a fatality rate that hovers between 30% and 50% — much higher than flu or COVID-19 — these are quite different viruses based on the ways they spread and the risks they pose to the public. At least for now, the hantavirus situation seem to be contained. That virus spreads much more slowly than Ebola and health officials acted quickly to contain it. Still, there’s no cure or vaccine for either hantavirus or the specific Bundibugyo strain of Ebola currently ripping through Africa.

The public attention devoted to these outbreaks is entirely warranted, given the potential for a global pandemic that could be worse than COVID. Between 2013 and 2016, the Western Africa Ebola epidemic impacted 10 countries, killing upwards of 11,000 people out of an estimated 30,000 infections. And that technically wasn’t a large enough health crisis to be called a pandemic.

No one should panic at this stage, since containing both outbreaks is a top priority for affected governments and health agencies. Still, the Ebola crisis in particular stands as an indictment of worsening apathy about public health, the proliferation of lies about vaccines, and the failure of leadership to invest in solutions that keep us healthy and safe.

The most obvious place to start is the staffing and funding cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but especially the erosion of USAID, previously the world’s largest foreign aid agency, which was gutted in 2025 by the DOGE cuts led by Elon Musk. As NPR’s global health correspondent Jonathan Lambert put it, “USAID staff placed across the country played a key role in flagging outbreaks of unidentified diseases, and CDC staff in DRC and in the U.S. lent their expertise — things like transporting samples to labs and testing them. But the Trump administration dismantled USAID last year, and CDC has experienced ongoing challenges from funding cuts.”

The Ebola outbreak is currently surging in mining areas mired in ongoing conflict between Congolese security forces and militant groups that have killed between 900 and 2,000 people in the last year alone. Humanitarian aid workers, such as those at USAID, are often able to reach areas of these war zones that government workers can’t, Lambert explained, which can help give the world a heads up when infectious diseases — the bedfellows of any war — begin to appear.

Indeed, under President Barack Obama, USAID and the CDC played a critical role in tamping down the 2014 Ebola epidemic by controlling the outbreak, managing the fallout and building competent leadership while preparing a response if Ebola spread to the U.S. — which thankfully didn’t happen. (There were a tiny number of cases.) That effort took some $5.4 billion, approved by Congress, though a 2018 audit found that the agencies still faced funding challenges.

But today, with essentially zero funding for such efforts, it’s impossible to mount anything close to the same response, which may allow outbreaks to surge and spread further. As reported in a 2020 study in Emerging Microbes and Infections, delays in detecting Ebola are associated with longer and larger outbreaks. In a statement to NBC News on Monday, the State Department denied that USAID cuts will hamper U.S. responsiveness, claiming their “reform” has left the agency “more aligned and effective.”

That doesn’t explain why the CDC seemed to be largely in the dark about the current Ebola outbreak until recently, although it’s the fourth largest on record. The already high caseload indicates that spread has been ongoing for weeks, yet the latest outbreak wasn’t announced until May 15. Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room physician and public health professor at Brown University, told CBS that the U.S. lacks the capacity to quickly respond to global outbreaks.

“Before the second Trump administration, USAID would have been on the ground,” Spencer said on Monday. “The CDC would have been on the ground at a moment’s notice, maybe even before a moment’s notice, of a new outbreak of Ebola because we were in a bunch of countries. We created relationships beforehand.”

Funding cuts don’t just undermine disease surveillance, they also undercut public trust, which continues to drop. With fewer resources to manage public health effectively, people increasingly assume the system is out to harm them, not help them. This became abundantly clear in August of 2025 when a gunman — who falsely believed that the COVID vaccine had made him suicidal — opened fire at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, shooting dozens of rounds and killing a police officer. But under Donald Trump’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the response has been to double down on criticism of the CDC’s response to the COVID pandemic. That erosion of trust can also come in the form of contradictory or pseudoscientific messaging, such as the torrent of anti-vaccine advice coming from Kennedy and others in his department.

One silver linings of the 2014 Ebola epidemic was that it accelerated vaccine development, resulting in the Ervebo vaccine, which is 97.5% effective at preventing infection and has been used to contain subsequent outbreaks. Unfortunately, the strain currently spreading in Africa is a different species and there’s no effective vaccine yet. Some scientists are suggesting using Ervebo anyway, in the hope that it will add some protection, but it’s not clear whether that will work.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

This underscores why technology like mRNA vaccine scaffolds, the technology used to inoculate against COVID, is so important. Such scaffolds can lead to faster, cheaper vaccine development, which otherwise can take many years and many millions of dollars. Indeed, mRNA Ebola vaccines are in development, showing comparable results to the live virus Ervebo vaccines, at least in rodents.

But under Trump and Kennedy, mRNA technology has been attacked, with funding for development slashed. In August 2025, the Trump administration terminated 22 mRNA vaccine development investments worth around $500 million, including some that were aiming to treat cancers. At the time, Kennedy said that HHS supported “safe, effective vaccines for every American who wants them. That’s why we’re moving beyond the limitations of mRNA and investing in better solutions.” This deliberately overlooks the capabilities of mRNA technology, and it’s not clear what “better solutions” Kennedy may have in mind.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr. and his allies have let measles rip through North America, with outbreaks now spreading into Mexico, resulting in at least 40 deaths. This week measles reached 1,900 cases across 27 different outbreaks, most of those in South Carolina and Utah. More than 90% of patients have been unvaccinated or have unknown vaccine status. The U.S. is already on pace to surpass the record-breaking 48 outbreaks and 2,200 plus cases in all of 2025.

Even before hantavirus or Ebola made headlines, the overall situation in U.S. health policy has prompted medical experts to warn that the country is driving a public health emergency of international concern. Yes, that’s the same designation given to Ebola-stricken countries, which seems strange at first glance. Other than measles, which is preventable, the U.S. is not the center of any major infectious disease outbreaks. Nonetheless, Matthew Herder, a professor of law and medicine at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, argues (along with colleagues) that the U.S. has become a major risk to global health, pointing to Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO on his first day in office, foreign aid cuts that have seen HIV infections rebound, alterations to childhood vaccination schedules, the overall erosion of pandemic preparedness and much more.

It’s astonishing that, in just 18 months, the U.S. has gone from being a leader in public health to a liability. This country isn’t just shunning science and common sense, but actively threatening them.

The Ebola outbreak could swell into the next great pandemic, or it could be contained and fizzle out, which is certainly the preferable option. We may find ourselves doing these mental exercises all over again every time there’s a major outbreak of disease anywhere in the world, which is only natural given the traumatic nature of pandemics and the human susceptibility to pestilence. But we wouldn’t need to be afraid that every health crisis might spiral into unnecessary death and illness if we had actual leadership on these issues.