Did US aid cuts worsen Ebola outbreak in Central Africa?

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The latest Ebola outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain, for which no strain-specific vaccine is availableImage: Moses Sawasawa/AP Photo/picture allianceAdvertisement

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a new Ebola outbreak almost every year. The current epidemic, however, is different.

Most Ebola outbreaks, including a devastating epidemic several years ago that caused at least 11,000 deaths in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, can be traced back to the Zaire strain, for which a vaccine has now been developed.

The latest outbreak is, however, caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain, named after a region in Uganda where it was first reported in 2007. There is neither a vaccine nor drug to fight this strain, which kills around one in three of those it infects.

The current outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda is the third and already deadliest Bundibugyo-related epidemic so far. As of Wednesday, at least 139 people were thought to have died, with an additional 600 suspected cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

"I'm deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus earlier this week in Geneva. He also warned that "these numbers will change as field operations are scaling up, including strengthening surveillance, contact tracing, and laboratory testing."

Ebola: What to know after WHO declares health emergency<br>To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

As soon as he became aware of the outbreak, Tedros immediately declared an international health emergency, without first consulting experts, which is customary. This is because the virus had reportedly already been spreading unnoticed for several weeks. Health experts are now racing to contain the virus, putting their own safety at risk in the process.

Meanwhile, some are asking whether the outbreak may have been noticed faster if the US government had not drastically reduced its contributions to global health care efforts over the last year.

Outbreak bigger than expected

US epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, one of the first prominent scientists to warn of the emerging COVID pandemic in January 2020, said we are likely only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

"[Ebola is] already killing healthcare workers and it's spread to so many different regions already," he told DW. "With very little testing, we're already finding so many [cases], that means we're just scraping the top and this outbreak is much wider than we thought." He also warned that the latest outbreak was spreading much faster than the 2014 epidemic in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Ebola is transmitted through direct contact with infected people or their bodily fluids. This means the infection risk is more limited than for the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus, which can spread through the air. In theory, therefore, the Bundibugyo variant could be contained by quarantining infected individuals through large-scale testing and contact tracing.

"The issue is the speed of deployment," said Feigl-Ding, adding that USAID used to have this, when it was on the ground, giving out medication, and funding local health care workers and clinics to do this. "Now USAID is gone. This is clearly one of the examples of what happens when you decimate the healthcare infrastructure in a lot of these countries."

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is arguably the best-known example of dismantled US institutions since Donald Trump's return to the White House.

In January 2025, the reelected US president issued an executive order freezing all aid payments for 90 days and ordering a review of how the funds were being used. Many USAID employees were laid off, and 90% of the budget was slashed. While Congress later increased funding again, the temporary interruptions have left their mark around the world. To make matters worse, many European governments, including Germany, have also drastically cut their development aid.

Trump's cost-cutting measures were also made possible by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who at the time was head of the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In February 2025, Musk admitted to the US cabinet that he had "accidentally" terminated some programs to contain the Ebola virus "very briefly."

The New York Times daily newspaper later reported that not all of the canceled programs had been restored. It also said that the cuts had made an Ebola outbreak in Uganda worse, according to US embassy staff in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

US President Donald Trump (right), seen here with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has...