What We Owe Each Other: Ebola, Borders, and the Politics of Shared Humanity

Ebola is back and so are travel bans, fear-mongering, anxiety-ridden messaging, and the particular chaos that descends when a disease most of the world has decided belongs to someone else crosses into the news cycle.

Almost a week ago, the world learned of a new Ebola outbreak unfolding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. The outbreak is caused by a rare species of orthoebolavirus known as Bundibugyo virus, which has caused only two previously recorded outbreaks in history: the first in Bundibugyo, Uganda in 2007, and the second in Isiro, DRC in 2012. This is the third. The large number of suspected cases and deaths at the time the outbreak was formally identified, and the location of the epicenter in Ituri province (a conflict-torn region with nearly a million displaced people) rightly raises alarm. The WHO moved rapidly to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, mobilizing international partners for the response.

While the DRC is no stranger to Ebola, this is the country’s 17th recorded outbreak, this crisis could not have come at a worse time. The shockwaves of funding cuts accompanying the dismantling of USAID are not yet fully absorbed. Logistical, collaborative, and technical support structures between US public health leadership and the rest of the global health infrastructure are at their most fragile in a generation. Cross-border spread into neighboring Uganda, and the potential for the outbreak to extend into South Sudan another country fractured by ongoing conflict is already drawing comparisons to the West Africa outbreak of 2014–2016.

That outbreak was the deadliest in recorded Ebola history. It resulted in more than 11,000 deaths and nearly 29,000 infections across Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, three West African countries that share many of the structural vulnerabilities of northeastern DRC: under-resourced health systems, histories of conflict, and communities with hard-earned reasons to distrust outside intervention.

Despite the devastation of that outbreak, the world was supposed to emerge better prepared. And in meaningful ways, it did.

We now have a licensed vaccine for Zaire ebolavirus, the species responsible for most historical outbreaks approved by both the FDA and the European Commission. Candidate vaccines for Sudan ebolavirus are in advanced phases of clinical development. Critically, no licensed vaccine or approved treatment currently exists for Bundibugyo virus, the species responsible for this outbreak. That gap is critical and is shaping every decision being made on the ground in Ituri right now.

Local capacity for viral sequencing across the African continent has also grown tremendously. Genomic centers of excellence have taken root in countries that a decade ago had to send samples abroad and wait weeks for results. In this outbreak, scientists at the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale in Kinshasa and the Central Public Health Laboratory in Kampala produced near-complete Bundibugyo genomes in under 16 hours from sample receipt, confirming a new spillover event and placing it in evolutionary context against all prior outbreaks. That is a scientific achievement that should be celebrated loudly and specifically.

These investments were doing exactly what they were designed to do before the seismic disruption of funding cuts and the withdrawal of US leadership from the global public health stage. In 2025, countries across Africa responded effectively to outbreaks of Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, and Marburg virus in Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and the DRC, each contained within a relatively short period. A genomics laboratory in South Africa sequenced Andes hantavirus from a passenger aboard the Hondius cruise ship who received care there, rapidly sharing the sequence with the world.

What this tells us is investment in building local capacity and strengthening health systems yields benefits for the entire global community, not only the countries that receive the aid. The question is whether we are willing to sustain that investment when there is no active crisis demanding our attention. Recent answers to that question have not been encouraging.

What has been most disheartening to observe in these early days of the response has been the resurfacing of travel bans.

The United States government rapidly moved to impose a 30-day travel restriction on all non-US citizens who had been in South Sudan, the DRC, or Uganda within the previous 21 days. Decades of public health evidence tell us that such bans especially imposed in the midst of an active outbreak are largely ineffective and reliably generate stigma, xenophobia, and racist rhetoric. In the specific context of this outbreak, the theater of these restrictions is even more transparent than usual.

The people at the epicenter of this crisis in Ituri province could not board a plane and fly to the United States even if they wanted to. The US issues so few visas for travel from DRC that the current administration did not even see fit to impose the visa bonds it introduced for countries with high overstay rates because Congolese nationals are denied visas at such high rates in the first place. The same dynamic applies to South Sudan. As for Uganda, visa bonds ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 are in place, figures that are effectively prohibitive for most citizens of a country where average wages make such sums unimaginable. A travel ban on populations that were already largely excluded from travel is not a public health measure, it is performance.

The consequences of that performance unfolded in real time just two days ago. An Air France flight from Paris bound for Detroit was diverted to Montreal after US authorities identified a passenger who had recently been in DRC. What followed was widespread panic online including viral claims that Bundibugyo virus is airborne. It is not. Like all ebolaviruses, Bundibugyo spreads only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of a symptomatic individual. The diverted passenger was assessed by Canadian public health authorities upon landing, determined to be asymptomatic, and routed back to Paris. They were not infectious and not a threat, yet sent home anyway.

This is what travel bans do. They other. They create panic. They spread disinformation. They erect barriers to the movement of resources, aid workers, and expertise toward the places that need them most. And they obscure a fundamental epidemiological reality, any meaningful risk of Bundibugyo virus reaching Europe or North America is far more likely to arrive via returning foreign nationals with the financial resources and passport privilege that affords them freedom of movement or via humanitarian workers evacuated abroad to receive care.

In the current outbreak, an American missionary physician working at Nyankunde Hospital in eastern DRC contracted Bundibugyo virus while caring for patients and was evacuated to Berlin’s Charité hospital for treatment, along with his wife and four young children. Six additional high-risk American contacts are also in the process of being evacuated. During the 2014–2016 West Africa outbreak, 27 foreign nationals the vast majority of them aid workers were medically evacuated for treatment in Europe and the United States. Not one was Liberian, Sierra Leonean, or Guinean. Those who received care in high-resource settings had survival rates of approximately 80%, substantially higher than those who did not have that choice or that privilege.

The travel ban targets Congolese nationals and the evacuations serve Americans and Europeans. The asymmetry is not incidental. It is the point.

Beyond travel bans, the news that a treatment center had been set on fire in Ituri after a grieving family demanded the return of their young son’s body, was met online with swift and heavy condemnation. I have seen posts calling those family members savages. I have watched people who have never set foot in eastern DRC render confident verdicts about the irrationality and danger of communities they know nothing about. What is entirely missing from those reactions is context and history.

Ituri province has been battered. Conflict has torn through this region since the mid-1990s. Fighting has intensified significantly since late 2025, displacing over 100,000 people in just the past two months, with nearly a million people internally displaced across the province overall. Just days before the treatment center was set on fire, militants linked to the Islamic State killed at least 17 people in a village in Ituri with machetes and firearms, burned homes, and took hostages. This is the environment in which health workers are asking families to surrender their dead.

In many parts of the world, a dignified burial is the final act of love a family can offer someone they have lost. The rituals that accompany death are intimately connected to beliefs about the afterlife, about the relationship between the living and the dead, about what it means to honor a life fully lived. Ebola does not dissolve these beliefs. It collides with them. And when health systems respond to that collision with rules rather than relationship, with enforcement rather than explanation, with the language of compliance rather than the language of care, they lose the trust that makes any response possible. That is not a failure of the community but a failure of the response and, it is also not new. During the 2018–2019 Ebola outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri, over 300 attacks on Ebola health workers were recorded in a single year, leaving six dead and 70 wounded. Violence in these situations is rarely random. It is almost always downstream of grief that has nowhere to go, of mistrust that has been earned over generations, of communities that have learned, correctly that outside actors do not always have their interests at heart.

I lived through COVID in the United States. I remember sitting with families who could not enter the ICU to say goodbye to a dying parent, a spouse, a child. Some of them grew angry. Some of them became frightening in their grief. I had enormous compassion for all of them because I understood that their anger was not really about me, or the rules, or even the hospital. It was about the unbearable fact of losing someone they loved without being able to hold them. If that parallel does not open a window into our shared humanity, I am not sure what will.

The communities in Ituri are not a problem to be managed. They are people to be met with transparency, with humility, with the recognition that trust is built slowly and destroyed quickly, and that no outbreak response has ever succeeded without it.

As we continue to watch this outbreak unfold in eastern DRC and Uganda, I find myself returning to a simple truth that the science consistently affirms and that politics consistently forgets: outbreak response works when it is grounded in equity, trust, and the recognition of shared humanity. It fails when it is organized around fear, exclusion, and the fiction that some people’s safety matters more than others’.

The scientists at INRB in Kinshasa who sequenced a novel virus genome in under 16 hours deserve our admiration and our investment. The contact tracers working in a conflict zone under the threat of violence deserve our solidarity and our protection. The nurses staffing treatment centers in Ituri deserve the supplies, the training, and the international support that would have been far more robust had the last several years unfolded differently. The families grieving their dead under impossible circumstances deserve our compassion not our condemnation.

Where one is born and the passport one carries are simply the luck of the draw. The people in the DRC and Uganda weathering the onslaught of a deadly disease; with no licensed vaccine, in a conflict zone, with their treatment centers on fire and their borders effectively sealed, did not choose this. They are playing the cards they were dealt. They are doing it with remarkable resilience and skill. And they are doing it while keeping the rest of us safer than our current policies deserve.

The least we can do in return is to see them as human and then to act accordingly.

I am an infectious disease physician and global health researcher who writes at the intersection of medicine, science, and justice. If you enjoyed reading this piece please consider subscribing or sharing it with others