Health workers and humanitarian groups are rushing to try and contain an Ebola outbreak spreading through eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with a former government minister warning the outbreak should be “a wake-up call” about the “dangerous” threat of UK and US aid cuts on the response to pandemics.
DRC’s eastern Ituri province has seen more than 390 suspected cases and at least 100 reported deaths, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention Jean Kaseya. Cases have also been detected elsewhere in the country and in neighbouring Uganda. Other neighbours Rwanda and South Sudan are now on high alert. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US has said that a “small number of Americans who are directly affected by this outbreak” are being withdrawn from the area.
Rory Stewart, who served as the UK’s Africa minister during the last major Ebola outbreak in 2018, said the connection between aid cuts implemented by Donald Trump and the UK and outbreaks like this was “very strong.” Such cuts have “huge impacts”, he added “particularly on things like global health”.
“Pandemic preparedness – in other words, dealing with an Ebola outbreak or even a new version of a Covid outbreak – requires lots of people on the ground in places like DRC or Uganda who are able to detect cases, respond to them, quarantine and prepare responses,” he told BBC Radio 4. ” And it’s all the infrastructure behind that which is being undermined at the moment. And that’s a real threat, of course, to the world.”
“I’m not trying to start a scare in Britain around this outbreak, but what I’m hoping will happen is people will see this and realise how dangerous this is, and how much risk we’re taking by not dealing with it more directly,” he added, saying that this outbreak is the “canary in the coal mine” for future problems.
Jean Pierre Badombo, the former mayor of Mongbwalu, a mining town in Ituri at the epicentre of the outbreak, said people started falling ill in April after a large open-casket funeral procession. “After that, we experienced a cascade of deaths,” he told Reuters. The World Health Organisation (WHO), who declared the outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern” over the weekend, said a strain of Ebola – Bundibugyo virus disease – was confirmed on 14 May, weeks later.
There is no approved vaccine or targeted treatment for this strain and the WHO has warned the true scale of infections was likely far greater than official figures suggested. The Bundibugyo strain had caused only two previous outbreaks, neither within the last decade, while its epidemiology remains poorly understood. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Centre at Brown University, told The Independent the relative lack of treatments and scientific understanding meant researchers were “flying blind and fighting the virus with both arms tied behind our backs.”
US foreign assistance spending fell by nearly 57 per cent after the Trump administration dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after the president returned to the White House for a second term last year, which had financed laboratory networks, disease surveillance programmes and emergency response capacity across the continent .Earlier this month the administration began plans to divert a further $2 billion in global health funding to cover the costs of shutting USAID operations overseas. Meanwhile, in the UK, billions of pounds are being cut from aid spending as the budget falls from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI),to fund increased defence spending.
Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official who led the agency’s Covid-19 response, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “The dismantling of US-funded health programming in DRC… is likely a big factor in why this outbreak was detected so late.” He warned that WHO, which he said had mounted one of its largest-ever deployments to help contain the 2018 DRC outbreak, was now “reeling” after Trump withdrew all US funding, cutting the agency’s emergency budget for health emergencies by 37 per cent and forcing it to lay off thousands of staff. He continued: “Its emergency contingency fund is close to empty. Tough starting point to mount a major response.”
Ms Nuzzo, of Brown University, said the outbreak bore “the cumulative effects of cuts to a number of global health programmes, which have reduced the people and attention given to public health threats.” Lawrence Gostin, university professor at Georgetown, agreed that there were “all the characteristics of weakened health systems, including very late detection, ongoing uncontrolled spread and deep distrust of public health workers.”
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
