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OpinionFirst Opinion

I led the U.S. CDC response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic. The new outbreak needs massive, immediate, meticulous action

Ebola is an unforgiving enemy, writes a former head of CDC

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A Doctors Without Borders doctor moves through the isolated red zone this week to monitor patients, provide care, and ensure sanitation of the facility at the Ebola treatment center in Munigi, DRC.Jospin Mwisha / AFP via Getty Images

By Tom Frieden<br>June 6, 2026

Frieden was director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2017.

By the time the world began responding to the West Africa epidemic in 2014, which killed more than 11,000 people before it ended in 2016, there were 40 to 50 suspected cases.

The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had approximately 10 times that number by the time the response started. Three weeks in, it has spread from three health zones to 25, with new areas added almost daily. National, provincial, and local health staff are responding intensively, but fewer than half of known contacts are being traced nationwide, laboratories are backlogged, no Ebola treatment center is ready, few health workers have been trained, there’s insufficient protective equipment for health workers and few medications for patients, and burial teams have come under attack.<br>Advertisement

The virus has a running head start, and every minute counts. With Ebola, time is lives. Get to an outbreak in days and you can stop it in weeks. Get there in weeks and it goes on for months. Get there in months and it can go on for years.

I led the CDC response to the 2014–2016 West Africa epidemic. I told the U.S., on camera, that any American hospital could safely care for an Ebola patient. Then a Dallas hospital sent a man home who had just arrived from Liberia with a fever. When he returned two days later, gravely ill, two nurses were infected. Three cases nearly overwhelmed us, while 3,000 raged in Liberia. That mistake nearly cost me my job — and, more importantly, could have cost lives.

Ebola is an unforgiving enemy. One unprotected nurse can start a new chain of transmission. One unsafe burial can seed hundreds of cases. The work of containing it is meticulous and exhausting: for clinicians in full protective gear in tropical heat, for contact tracers who must find every person a patient touched, for the epidemiologists who must track every cluster, and for the community workers who must explain terrifying facts to patients, families, and communities.<br>Advertisement

This outbreak began in a gold-mining hub in Ituri and spread along travel routes before it was caught, and it’s spreading in places where more than 100 armed groups operate. Ebola is hard to control in the best of conditions. It’s close to impossible to control when people are shooting at you.

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If Americans risk their lives fighting Ebola overseas, they deserve the right to come home

There’s no vaccine or proven treatment for this strain — but that was true in 2014, and the response stopped it anyway. Supportive care saves lives. Contact tracing, quarantine, and rapid isolation control spread. A vaccine and treatment are urgently needed, but we can control the outbreak without them — if the world acts right now.

The most experienced people at stopping Ebola are the doctors, nurses, and epidemiologists of DRC and Uganda. They’ve done it before; what’s different now is the scale needed. DRC needs surge support, including clinicians, labs, infection-control specialists, logistics, and funding for community health workers and for substantial community support (food, medicines, bed nets, clean water). Communities respond to Ebola the way humans respond to any terrifying disease: with fear, denial, and sometimes violence. Only trusted...