Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly"

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/05/ebola-outbreak-now-third-largest-recorded-and-spreading-rapidly/

by Brajeshwar • 2 months ago

119 121 2 months ago

This unfortunately won’t be news again until, and I think this is now an until versus if, we find evidence the disease is spreading uncontrollably outside the DRC.

SilverElfin2• 2 months ago

I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.

scotty79• 2 months ago

You think an outbreak, in for example Belgium, would be 24/7 news in Demorcatic Republic of Congo?

jansan• 2 months ago

If that outbreak was in a midsize European town like Marburg they would even name the virus after it.

mentalgear4• 2 months ago

Exemplified by the ridiculous Hanta-Virus news/social media coverage for weeks - even though the risks were much lower and contained - but it happened on a CRUISE ship which the news people thought might resonate with the western vacation crowd.

somenameforme10• 2 months ago

Ebola isn't like most people think. It isn't airborne, isn't respiratory and requires direct contact with blood/semen/feces/etc to spread. It's also only known to be contagious once symptoms are present. The risk of a global outbreak is very low.

Africa has a large array of unique circumstances that make it much more 'viral' there, including various cultural funerary rituals that involve contact with corpses that can have extremely high viral loads, bushmeat consumption/processing (ebola can spread from animals to humans), as well as all the more stereotypical (and accurate nonetheless) reasons as well that make it particularly dangerous for healthcare workers there.

It's not entirely clear how it could spread uncontrollably outside of Africa.

dyauspitr4• 2 months ago

Viruses are viruses though. Becoming airborne and less deadly (like this current strain) would be a death knell for the world. The longer you let it hang around the longer it has time to adapt. This is why HIV medication is prescribed so overwhelmingly. One of the main goals is to stop all replication immediately or it rather quickly “figures out” how to get past the drug.

JumpCrisscross3• 2 months ago

Ebola isn't like most people think

Bunga bunga or whatever isn’t classic ebola. And it’s being given an expanding substrate on which to evolve.

unsupp0rted2• 2 months ago

But surely once somebody explains that kissing (yes, literally) the deceased corpse of an ebola patient is a bad idea they'll stop doing that

christkv5• 2 months ago

You are only infectious during illness and it requires contact with fluids. It's exasperated by local funeral rituals where people interact with the dead body and get infected.

zulux• 2 months ago

"relatives slept in the same room as the body, stayed beside it continuously, or had direct physical contact during overnight mourning."

I’ll do my best to avoid the overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.

bananamogul2• 2 months ago

This makes the recent burning of ebola clinic tents by angry relatives make more sense.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-tent-fire-congo-9.721000...

BJones122• 2 months ago

This is a great example of how some cultures are better than others.

SecretDreams3• 2 months ago

So your claim is this won't be an issue for the rest of the world? What are the underlying implications from your statement?

christkv5• 2 months ago

That it does not spread that easily and that its current spread is more a combination of factors in the specific area. War, hunger, refugees, culture and lack of education. It’s to say it’s hard for it to land and expand. Once you have symptoms the patient is also very quickly immobilized reducing the spread further.

illusive4080• 2 months ago

0% chance this spreads rapidly in the first world.

mentalgear4• 2 months ago

I wonder if you have sources on this? I heard that this is a new variant that has a much longer incubation time. A longer time until symptoms appear means it will spread much quicker and wider (that was also the issue with Covid that had a incubation time of 5 - 8 days).

christkv5• 2 months ago

Sure https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4456362/ it outlines history and spread. incubation period is long but there is no asymptomatic transmission that is known.

ShinyLeftPad9• 2 months ago

This variant may have longer incubation time but you are almost not infectious without symptoms. The more symptomatic you become, the more you spread. This is in contrast to COVID or some flus where you are most infectious in the incubation period.

pixelpoet• 2 months ago

Exacerbated*, however it surely is exasperating how poorly this is being handled.

christkv5• 2 months ago

Do you know how big this area is and how difficult it is?

r721• 2 months ago

The "coughing up blood" symptom can cause you to come into contact with fluids involuntarily.

christkv5• 2 months ago

sure but's not flu or covid in ability to spread.

doubled112• 2 months ago

Avoid anybody who is coughing up blood. Noted.

I tend to do this naturally. Even people who sound like they might cough up blood.

arjie• 2 months ago

the US has “abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.”

It’s interesting to note that in the end, there was no one else coming: we were it. A large amount of disease containment and control was just fronted by the United States. As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. It’s not that the Chinese century will have their massive industrial engine put to the tasks that America put hers to. It’s just that things won’t get done.

Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.

hedora2• 2 months ago

I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. The US was previously the center of international collaboration for science and technology, and that took decades to establish.

The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.

The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?)

I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically:

1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left

2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.

pjot• 2 months ago

  > The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.

Is this true? From years of watching Top Gear any Chinese car that was tested was laughably bad.

WarmWash6• 2 months ago

Trump is the populist candidate elected to put the US back on competitive economic footing.

His economic policy has way more overlap with Bernie's than people tend to understand. Both believe immigration lowers wages, and both believe tariffs are imperative (you have to dig back to pre-2017 talk from Bernie, he changed his website/talking points after Trump won).

Edit: People struggle so hard with politics because everyone is totally blinded by there side. Here are populist things Trump has done/trying to do

- remove taxes on tips

- implement tariffs on foreign goods

- implement strict immigration policy (note sanders wanted a pathway to citizenship, he did not want an open border, and he never addressed how he would handle millions showing up at the border)

- block corporate landlords from single family home ownership

- create a government funded college level education program to get free bachelor degrees.

- take government ownership stake in large American companies (us steel, intel)

- cap interest rates on credit cards

- lower central bank interest rates

- de-criminalizing drugs, reschedule marijuana

- pro crypto

- pro prediction markets

Guys, you can hate Trump, you can accurately access he isn't intelligent or competent, criticize his brutish approach, but if you cannot recognize he is a populist, you are objectively lost-in-the-sauce.

epgui2• 2 months ago

The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly

Uhhh no? How did they screw up? They were notified late, and then they did what they were supposed to do.

SecretDreams3• 2 months ago

Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.

One year isn't a lot of time to fill a gap that was previously filled by decades of hard work.

Maybe if the US had had a transition plan, other competent and capable countries could have better filled the gap.

gchamonlive• 2 months ago

Yet it isn't fair to people that rely on such assistance to drop it without a plan to substitute the assistance provider. It was all done overnight. One day you had outposts serving people in need, the other they had their doors closed.

So don't act like the world should be thankful for all the US has done when it pulls the plug in such a way that is maybe more devastating than having done nothing, because at least nothing would have left the spot for someone else to have risen to the occasion. Maybe this time though without using people's basic needs to create a political tool to be used opportunitistically.

adventured• 2 months ago

The world has never been thankful for the positive things the US has done. The only thing it ever garnered were the briefest of superficial nods. China gets drastically more respect with their approach than the US ever has, while doing a tiny fraction of the good.

The US saved tens of millions of Russians from starvation a century ago. Culturally they have absolutely no clue about that, they're entirely oblivious in terms of their own history. The good deeds never garnered the US any positive credit. Only the bad deeds garner the US bad credit aplenty.

aorloff• 2 months ago

You are discounting the notion that other powers have something to gain by letting the US own this fuckup a bit more before reacting

spwa4• 2 months ago

And you are discounting the notion that most of those other powers existed before the US. China did. Europe did. Ottoman empire/islam did. They didn't help. Where are the signs they've changed?

hiddencost• 2 months ago

I can't get my roof replaced in less than a year. These things take time .

greatgib• 2 months ago

China is there when there is money to make or resources to grab, but in the last decades never helped any one else than themselves.

dyauspitr4• 2 months ago

The US was a force for good in the world. There may be a million counterpoints but contemporary American was and still barely is a massive win for the world.

yapyap• 2 months ago

Lol.

The old system recognized that you need an alive world to exploit, financially and through debt. The new system is hoping to rule through raw power because it’s being ran by shortsighted idiots who do not recognize they are standing on the shoulders of more tactical rulers.

Neither of them noble.

lr1970• 2 months ago

As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in.

What's about EU? EU is bigger than the USA in total population and it has comparable if not larger total GDP. Why did not they step in where USA failed?

maldev• 2 months ago

The US has about a 50% higher gdp, while having 30% less population. Not only this, but the EU can barely fund it's military obligations, let alone others. You frame it as the US failing, but I think it's more the US winning since they didn't really lose anything. I would argue they gained, since now the EU and it's competitors are having to spend money to solve things like this, and the EU and Asia are far closer to Ebola outbreaks and spreading due to population movements than the US is.

Why should the US fund some people in Africa who can't control the outbreak of a very easily contained disease, instead of it's own people.

hedora2• 2 months ago

Like Trump 1.0’s handling of COVID, this outbreak is going to spread further and faster than it would have if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives.

Those initiatives inevitably cost far less than the economic impact of outbreaks (the US is currently diverting international travelers), but the best deal maker in the history of the universe says they’re a “bad deal”, so the rest of the planet gets to suffer.

BJones122• 2 months ago

if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives

There are ~197 countries in the world, you should also criticize the other 196 for also not wanting to pay for the exact same thing.

SecretDreams3• 2 months ago

Maybe there could have been direct solicitation for funds from other countries before suddenly and dramatically pulling the plug on decades of hard work?

jeremyjh• 2 months ago

Maybe there should have been a plan. A period of notice and a transition plan. It couldn't happen, since the Trump administration does not believe in competence, only in spectacle.

thinkingtoilet• 2 months ago

I'm American. I will criticize America. If you live in another country, you work there to improve how you help the least fortunate people on the planet. I'm not going to write letters to the government of Turkmenistan. It should also be noted America is the richest country in the history of the world so expecting to do more is quite reasonable.

dfxm12• 2 months ago

The US touts itself as being in the position of the richest and most powerful country in the world. The president lays claim to the title "leader of the free world". They deserve the blame to match their means and influence.

I'm also not going to criticize, for example, the UK, for recently providing 20 million pounds in new aid to help contain the outbreak...

frm88• 2 months ago

Pillai again dodged questions on why an American doctor infected in the outbreak and another exposed were sent to Germany and the Czech Republic, respectively, and not to the US.

I criticise one country for denying re-entry of their own infected citizens.

mentalgear4• 2 months ago

And just like during the COVID pandemic, look who sits in the White (Casino) House again ... with Elon's DOGE having cut even more essential pandemic monitoring and response systems.

senectus1• 2 months ago

given how Trump is the direct cause of making flights so expensive that many countries are slowing down or stopping flights to or from them... there is a fair chance his incompetence is going to directly lead to a lack of spreading.

jmpman2• 2 months ago

Grok is very defensive of Elon's role in the current Ebola outbreak. However if you push on Elon impacting Ebola monitoring, it will eventually admit that Elon's DOGE cancelled "some" Ebola prevention efforts very briefly, but in reality many Ebola related contracts and programs were not fully restored. "Surveillance capacity in eastern DRC weakened, contributing to the current Bundibugyo Ebola strain circulating undetected for an estimated 6–8 weeks before confirmation."

ceejayoz2• 2 months ago

A while back "oops, we accidentally canceled ebola monitoring" was a White House press conference laugh line made by Musk, in fact.

https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2056461616162431323

mentalgear4• 2 months ago

Fking Billionaire Wackos are going to be the death of all of us (while they will escape to their New Zealand underground bunkers staffed with robot servants).

e12e• 2 months ago

I was curious if the basic ai chatbots behaved differently - been a while since I tried the same prompt across models..:

Apparently Gemini is the late night news anchor:

https://g.co/gemini/share/3504289b8dc8

Chatgpt the art critic:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a11e80e-523c-83ea-9a1b-03329f860c...

And grok somewhat of an apologist:

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_4071d2b9-ae39-43cc-abf1-cd...

WarmWash6• 2 months ago

I understand the need for charity, and we should be doing it to support these countries.

But I don't see how to logically make the connection that when you pull that charity back, you are now responsible for any crisis.

That is exactly the argument that people who are against foreign aid make.

Like I will help you walk and feed your dog if you can't all the time, but if I stop doing that and your dog gets sick, that's not my fault and I'm not a bad person.

ceejayoz2• 2 months ago

How you pull it back matters.

Why you were doing it in the first place matters, too.

SpicyLemonZest2• 2 months ago

You're mixing up different "you"s. If the American legislature got together and passed a law saying the American people just don't want to do so much foreign aid anymore, that would be a hard call.

But that's not what happened. Elon Musk, a random rich guy who was not himself financing the charity, appointed himself dictator of all American spending programs. He promised his patron that he would make the government run more efficiently, but found himself unable to. Then he went around randomly breaking charitable programs in an attempt to prove that his failed government efficiency initiative was producing meaningful outcomes. That's why he is accountable (and will be held accountable) for the people his decisions have killed.

dnqthao2• 2 months ago

It is not charity, these are to protect the US against these diseases. Do you think it will stay there and will not come to US shore?

bonesss• 2 months ago

The US is by leaps and bounds the world’s largest economy.

“Charity” is not foreign aide. Foreign aide keeps the refugees from the one chunk of wherever from overwhelming the government of their neighbour which has a knock-on effect on the price of Critical Defence Material or shipping and/or oil. That bones us, even if we hate everyone involved.

Then, afterwords, everyone has to do a ton of work re-corrupting and re-inserting their business interests into the upstart regimes. We want the Devils we know and have bribed handsomely, new bribes suck.

It has very little to do with ‘them’, per se, and everything to do with our wallets. Granted, normal business people like stability; disruption, famine, and war work very well for others. We prefer to choose when we topple regimes than having food shocks and epidemics thrust it upon us, better ROI and easier scheduling.

smnrchrds• 2 months ago

Imagine if you fall seriously ill and a charity hospital comes to you and admits you in, giving you medical care and shelter, at no cost to you. You are in dire need of urgent care, so you accept. There are round the clock nurses and doctors and you're attached to a ventilator.

Then one day hospital management changes and the next morning, they fire everyone and turn off your ventilator, not even giving you time to find another hospital to move to. Many patients suffocate to death before noon.

Did the new manager do anything wrong?

jltsiren• 2 months ago

Framing it as charity misses the point.

Power is always based on reciprocal obligations. Everywhere in the world, at every point in history. While modern societies try to formalize the obligations, there are plenty of informal expectations that are equally important.

Because infectious diseases do not respect international borders, someone must be in charge of international surveillance and response to outbreaks. When someone does what must be done for the common good, people tend to see them as a leader. If they stop doing their job as a leader, people interpret it as abandoning their responsibilities. And when someone fails to do what is expected from them, people will think poorly of them.

rafram• 2 months ago

Why are you writing about / thinking about the things an AI model said to you? It’s an LLM trained heavily on Elon tweets and pro-Elon internet content. Of course it’s going to say nice things about Elon. It’s an LLM, not some kind of oracle. It seems like the existence of a massive Ebola outbreak is more worthy of discussion than some random LLM output related to it!

slg3• 2 months ago

It’s an LLM trained heavily on Elon tweets and pro-Elon internet content.

I get what you're saying and generally agree with the overall point, but this specific aspect makes it worth remarking that even the model trained to be pro-Elon concedes Elon is at fault.

jmpman2• 2 months ago

I have a theory that you're less likely to be sued by Musk if you're quoting his LLM's statements about him.

Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly"

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