The Tamesis
A New York doctor who survived Ebola infection more than a decade ago said he worries for the health care workers at treatment centers. latest outbreak In a remote province in eastern Congo.
Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room physician and public health professor at Brown University, told CBS News on Friday, “Health care workers are a group that I’m really worried about because they are in very close contact with people when they are most contagious, and especially when people are dying.”
Authorities in Congo’s eastern Ituri province are dealing with a new Ebola outbreak suspected of causing at least 246 cases and 65 deaths, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Friday.
This is the 17th Ebola outbreak in Congo since 1976. The most severe of these Ebola outbreaks killed more than 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016.
“We are very aware that the country has experience, but this is happening in a very unstable area with a continuing deterioration of the humanitarian situation and migration of people from South Sudan to Uganda and other areas,” Dr. Abdi Rahman Mahmoud, director of health emergency alert and response operations at the World Health Organization, told a news conference on Friday.
spencer Infection with Ebola virus In September 2014, he was in Guinea working with the non-profit organization Doctors Without Borders. He spent three weeks working with Ebola patients in Guinea.
When he returned to New York City the following month and returned home on October 17, 2014, he said he began self-monitoring, taking his temperature twice a day.
On October 23, 2014, less than a week after returning home, he developed fever symptoms and was taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital, the designated Ebola treatment center at the time.
Health officials tested and decontaminated his apartment, and his then-fiancée and two friends were quarantined.
“The Zaire strain I had seems to have the highest mortality rate, but they all produce very similar symptoms of fatigue [that] It ultimately leads to vomiting, diarrhea, extreme weakness and weight loss,” Spencer said.
he Hospitalized 19 days in Bellevue full recovery. He received a combination of antiviral and experimental treatments, as well as blood transfusions from Ebola survivors.
“Let me tell you, you’re in a room by yourself for 19 days with nothing but a little window, a little screen … and a service provider who comes in a space suit a couple of times a day. That’s your only human interaction,” Spencer said. “But I’m lucky because I’m alive, whereas most people who get Ebola don’t, especially the people I was caring for in West Africa and Guinea.”
The latest outbreak is believed to be a strain called Bundibuggio Ebola virus (BDV), CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Céline Gounder reports. Gounder said the strain had been responsible for only two known outbreaks before, one in Uganda in 2007 with 55 cases and another in Congo in 2012 with 57 cases.
There are currently no approved vaccines or treatments for BDV, she said.
“Medical professionals seem very concerned about the possibility or ability to control this condition,” Gund said. “When we heard the news, this was already a major outbreak. There had been multiple deaths. This is an Ebola virus and we have no treatment and no vaccine.”
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that only 20 samples have been tested so far, with 13 confirmed positive.
The U.S. has been the largest outside player in the Ebola response in the past, but now experts are worried about the impact of the Trump administration Disband USAID and its withdrawal United States from the World Health Organization.
Spencer said he believes there may be a connection between USAID’s closure and the fact that the latest outbreak was not officially announced until Friday. He said it was also concerning that the White House did not have a director of the Office of Epidemic Preparedness and Response. Gerald Parker named by Trump management office In February 2025, he resigned later that year, and the position remains vacant to this day.
“Right now, we don’t have that capacity,” he said of a rapid response to the global outbreak. “We don’t have a director or anybody in the Office of Epidemic Preparedness and Response. We don’t have anybody to coordinate the State Department and the CDC and our relationships with foreign actors and the World Health Organization. We have unlearned a lot of the hard lessons learned over the past decade and over the past five years.”
Before the Trump administration’s latest move, Spencer said the U.S. would likely have sent officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Congo before the outbreak.
“USAID has been on the ground since before the second Trump administration,” Spencer said. “CDC would be on the scene at a moment’s notice, possibly even before we received a new Ebola outbreak because we were in multiple countries. We had relationships established beforehand.”
Still, despite the problems, Spencer said he believes the U.S. is still capable of dealing with a virus like Ebola, which, despite its high mortality rate, said “it’s not that transmissible.” He pointed to the U.S. response this month Deadly hantavirus outbreak On a Dutch cruise ship. The 18 Americans on board are currently being monitored in an isolation room at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
“In the past few weeks, we’ve seen the state quarantine unit in Nebraska and a dozen centers across the United States be able to handle very serious pathogens like hantavirus and Ebola,” Spencer said. “These are commitments we have made as a country, especially in part because of my own case a decade ago.”
