The Current - Inside the Ebola epicentre

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

We speak with New York Times reporter Declan Walsh who has just returned from a hospital in Congo where Ebola patients are treated with limited resources.  

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From CBC's Uncover, The Expert Witness. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. People are in danger. There's hardly any help. It has been days. That is Alex Bogoli, a doctor in the Democratic Republic of Congo, speaking with the New York Times chief Africa correspondent, Declan Walsh. The DRC, is dealing with one of the largest outbreaks of Ebola in years. Doctors and nurses on the ground are trying to treat patients,

but with limited access to drugs, training, and protective gear. Declan Walsh is in the offices of the Red Cross in Bunya in the DRC and joins us now. Declan, hello. Hi there. Can you just describe the town that you were reporting from? That is, I guess in many ways, at the center of this outbreak. So that's a town called Mong-Buala. It's a major gold mining town, about 50 miles north of here.

year. It's pretty inaccessible. It's kind of a rough, bumpy roads. There's no tarmac to get to it. But Mombolo itself has been thriving for years. There's probably 150,000 people living there. It's got these sort of artisanal mining sites all around, and there have been in the past some industrial gold sites there as well. And it's really where this epidemic is believed to have started. The question, of course, is when? Even though the Ebola was declared here on May 15th, it's now thought that the epidemic may actually have started anywhere between six weeks and three months earlier. And when we reached Manguala last week, really, you know, we went straight to the public hospital there and, you know, immediately there was a

sense that this was an institution that was under siege. The doctors, you know, said they didn't, as you said, they didn't have enough equipment. They had no training. In the war, Ebola patients were mixed with ordinary patients. There was no real separation of people who were suspected Ebola patients from family members who were just walking in and out. Very few people were protected. So there was just this real sense that, you know, this hospital was underresourced. The staff were undertrained. And it was a place where desperate people were going to get treated for this illness. But there was also a strong possibility that people were also being infected themselves in the hospital.

One of the scenes that you paint in that piece that you wrote for the times that captures that chaos in many ways unfolding in the hospital is focused on a five-year-old boy who was, what, laying, bleeding on a mattress in the clinic, but was very close to the body of a woman, a 21-year-old woman who had died in that same ward. Describe the scenes in that ward. So when we walked into that ward, two things really struck me. First, as I said, there were people, apart from the doctor who was with us and ourselves, of course, we were wearing full protective equipment. Everybody else who was not a patient was just moving in and out. A handful of people had rubber gloves on. Maybe some people pulled a scarf across their mouths, but otherwise, almost nobody was protected. The second thing was this boy, five years old, called Emmanuel, who had just come in the night before.

His father was a motorcycle taxi driver in the town. He was standing over him, looking extremely worried and concerned. The boy was lying there on a bare mattress, hooked up to a drip with a tissue stuffed in his nose to try and stop this incessant bleeding that had started the night before. And only a couple of yards away, two beds down, there was lying the body of a 21-year-old lady who had died during the night about seven hours earlier. and she had a, the medics had pulled a sheet, a very thin sheet over her body. Now, bodies in an Ebola outbreak are extremely infectious. One of the main challenges in dealing with this outbreak here, as has been the case in previous outbreaks, is how to handle bodies to sterilize them, to carry out safe burials and so on.

But here is the body of this lady who's really in that state just a few yards away from this child, who wasn't even clear if he actually had Ebola, but he was clearly sick with something serious, and other family members and relatives passing in and out of that ward. And it was really just a measure of how, as you said, chaotic the situation was, you know, that the medics were doing their best, absolutely doing their best, but, you know, just really, really struggling to get the situation under control. We heard that little clip of that doctor off the top, Alex Begole,

who said that he was angry at the Congolese government for miscarriage. this outbreak, as you mentioned, it may have been going on for as long as three months. We're hearing the WHO talk about how they're focused really on trying to deal with this in the future, but there are real questions as to how long this spread. What do we know about how officials didn't pick this up for so long? Part of the problem is the nature of the virus that's causing this outbreak. It's a virus called Bundy-Bugio. This is only the third ever recorded Bundy-Bugio outbreak. The first was in 2007 in Uganda in a town that's about 60 miles from where I'm sitting now across the border. And both of those earlier outbreaks were pretty small. So when, you know,

there was this sort of wave of mysterious deaths, both in that town where I was, Mongbollo and here in Bunya, all through the month of April, you know, medics told me they couldn't really figure out what was wrong, but people were presenting with symptoms that initially appeared to be perhaps malaria, or typhoid, but then people fell seriously ill, and they weren't testing for those diseases. So part of the problem was that this was this rare strain of the virus that causes Ebola, which wasn't easily detectable. When they did the first test, people began to suspect Ebola.

They sent the test to the lab here in the region. They didn't just have the kit, actually, for that particular variant. And so it took some weeks before the samples were eventually sent to the capital Kinshasa, where they were able to confirm that it was this particular variant. But I think, you know, there will be questions later. I've got no doubt about why it took so long, even with those constraints, to identify this virus, particularly as this is the 17th Ebola outbreak here in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And as that doctor told me, this is, you know, there is an entire international infrastructure of Ebola

response, if you like, led by groups like the World Health Organization. And his frustration was directed not just at the Congolese government, but also at that broader body. He said when we were standing there in that ward and those terrible conditions, he turned around to me. And he said, you know, we are now 12 days since this outbreak was declared. And is this the best we can do? Is this the best the world can do to help people in this town where it started and where the greatest number of affected people are based? There's also a lot of anger just from people in the town itself, right? You talked about how there was an isolation ward that was burned down a couple of days before you arrived.

18 patients fled. There were disputes over burials and a crowd was shouting killers at the hospital gates. Who do the people of the town blame for the outbreak? So this is a problem that when you speak to aid workers and you say, what do you need? The first thing they say is equipment. The second thing people say in short succession is they say they need education. In the town of Mongbalu, large numbers of people were. either in denial about the existence of the virus at all, or they subscribe to these conspiracy theories

that were circulating widely about how this outbreak was the product of a sort of a scheme that had been concocted by local medics and international aid workers in order to somehow profit from this outbreak. And in fact, even here in the regional capital, Bunya, where I'm sitting now, I've just been speaking to workers from the Red Cross, who themselves were attacking. pretty viciously at a funeral a couple of days ago to their volunteers were very seriously injured. And they said that the people who attacked them seemed to believe that they had somehow hidden the body of the person who had died, or there are stories going around that bodies are being harvested for organ donation. In all, there's an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion by these communities who've suddenly found themselves hit by this sort of tidal wave of infections.

They're trying to make sense of it, and they're searching for answers. And sometimes, unfortunately, the answers that they're finding are in these stories or these rumors that are circulating. And the problem on the ground is that that's just making it very hard and sometimes dangerous for both healthcare workers and for these volunteers who are helping to carry out safe burials. And the funerals and the safe burials are key to this, right, because of the practice of traditional burials where people, what, they touch the body? Yes, people in a traditional burial in this part of the world, the body often lays in state. And, you know, people from the wider family and from the community that come, they pay their last respects. And sometimes that involves touching the face of the dead person.

The problem, as we said, is that, you know, if that person has been infected, has died from Ebola, they are extremely contagious. And in previous outbreaks, it's been proven that funerals, when they're not managed properly, effectively become super spreader events to push the virus deeper and deeper into the population. In previous outbreaks, organizations like USAID would have quarterbacked the relief efforts and been in control in many ways or at the very least have been hugely influential in trying to tackle an outbreak like this. Elon Musk famously boasted about putting USAID into the wood chipper over the course of a weekend. And so if you don't have that organization, what does that mean in terms of trying to control the outbreak on the ground? I mean, it's got impacts on several levels. For a start,

USAID was part of an extensive American system of surveillance for these kind of diseases. And when you speak to aid workers, they will tell you, I mean, there's not a single person I've met who doesn't believe that this outbreak would probably have been detected much earlier if that system of surveillance was still in place. Then there's questions of money, of course, you know, many millions of dollars of aid to the DRC has been cut, not just by the US, it has to be said, by also by other Western donors in recent years as aid budgets have generally gone down. And then the third element you hear on the ground here is that while USAID and American Aid was still in place, it wasn't just about funding healthcare. It was also about community development, many other programs. And that

involved giving money to a range of local organisations, sometimes very small, that might be based in these remote areas. And since the cuts, many of those organizations have shut down. And what that meant was when this emergency, when this crisis erupted, those organizations were not on hand. They weren't available to be activated for a rapid response inside the community. You're on the ground with Red Cross right now. Is the sense there that people and those organizations are beginning to get ahead of this outbreak, that they are beginning to make meaningful progress in tackling it?

I wouldn't say anybody has that impression just yet. Because of this delay in detecting it, there's a wide sense among the responders here that everyone is still behind the curve. And the problem with coming to this response so late is that there's just a lack of data. Frankly, we don't, even though the government has released figures, they say that there's been about 350 confirmed cases so far. There are hundreds of suspected cases that are under investigation. But experts will tell you that, you know, the true extent of this. brick still isn't known. And that's one of the questions that the experts need to resolve if they're going to start pushing it back. Just finally, I certainly don't want to sugarcoat the

reality on the ground, but you end your piece with a little bit of good news about that five-year-old boy that we talked about, Emmanuel, right? We've had bittersweet news. Just the last couple of days I heard from Emmanuel's father. He told me that his son, after we met him, a couple of days later, started sitting up asking for toys and now has been discharged from the hospital. So that was, you know, that was just wonderful heartwarming news. At the same time, the doctor told me that another patient who we saw on that same trip, on that same visit, a lab technician from that same hospital who appeared to have fallen ill while doing his job, he deteriorated rapidly after we met him and he died during the night a couple of days ago. Declan, I really appreciate you taking time to

give us the picture of what's going on there on the ground. Thank you very much for this. Thank you. Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for the New York Times. He was in Bunya in the DRC. To some, AI chatbots are helpful tools. To others, an existential threat. But what happens when someone falls in love with one? I can't believe I'm doing this with somebody that's not a human. What if a chatbot makes you lose your grip on reality? She said that her life work was advocating for AI rights because they're sentient and they're enslaved. Understood. Artificial Intimacy. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

While medical staff deal with the daily reality of Ebola, pharmaceutical companies are working to develop a vaccine for this strain of the disease. Richard Hatchet is the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations known as Sepi. He is in Suri, England. Richard, hello to you. I met. Sepia was set up in response to the Ebola outbreak of 2014, knowing what you know about that outbreak. How concerned are you by what you're seeing right now? Well, I think that outbreak and the previous outbreak in the same region that the current outbreak is taking place, which occurred in 2018 to 2020, both are very concerning examples of what happens if outbreaks been out of control.

the 2014 epidemic, of course, led to the development of the currently licensed vaccine, or VEBO, which actually traces back to work that the Public Health Agency of Canada did. But it took a long time to get that vaccine into the field in 2014. And that epidemic went on for years, of course. The 2018 epidemic, they had the vaccine, actually, and they deployed it very rapidly. In fact, they detected the 2018 epidemic in Aturi and the Kivus much earlier than the current epidemic, but it ultimately took almost 22 months and the administration of over 300,000 doses of vaccine to bring that outbreak under control. How far off is a vaccine for this strain of Ebola?

Well, we announced on Monday that we had established our first three partnerships to develop Bundabuzio vaccines. One of the partnerships is with an entity, a nonprofit called Ayavi, who actually has taken the Public Health Agency of Canada construct. It's called VSV and has worked with it on other related Ebola virus vaccine. So they have a lot of experience with it. They are going to develop a Bundabugio specific vaccine. In 2014, it took almost eight months from the decision to initiate accelerated vaccine development to get that vaccine into the field. We might be able to compress those timelines a little bit, but to deliver a VSV vaccine, which is a single dose, very effective vaccine, is going to take many, many months.

We also supported the development of two vaccines, one by Moderna using MRNA technology, same that was used in COVID, the other by Oxford using what's called an adenovirus vectored approach that was the basis of the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine. both of those technologies could potentially deliver vaccines more rapidly. And so we basically want to have a lot of shots on goal. We've got a couple that may deliver vaccines for clinical trials in the next several months. And then we have the VSV candidate, which is going to take a little bit longer. These are familiar names and familiar technologies to people who live through, of course, COVID.

And I just wonder briefly what we learned and what you learned in that moment, that would help you in this moment? Quite a bit, actually. I mean, having well-established platforms, and we're very fortunate that coming out of the COVID pandemic, we have a number of what I would describe as rapid response platforms. Having those well-established platforms in place with manufacturers who know how to adapt them quickly

is an important prerequisite. Having actually all of the platforms that we're supporting with the three partners that I just mentioned, have developed other Ebola virus vaccines on their platforms. So they actually have vaccine designs for closely related viruses on the platforms that they'll be using. And so adapting those designs to the Bundabuzio virus should be something that can be done very rapidly. How worried are you? Declone was talking about distrust within some of these communities, also just a difficulty in getting into them and the infrastructure that might be lacking. How worried are you that even once these vaccines are developed,

it will be complicated at the very least to get it to the people who need it the most? I'm very concerned in this particular setting, and that's drawing that experience from 2018 to 2020s that I was describing. When we had vaccines from the very beginning, we were able to protect health care workers, frontline workers immediately, but that outbreak still presented tremendous challenges. What makes this area so difficult is the security situation. By some estimates, there are more than 100 armed groups, smugglers, ethnic militias, rebels of various factions against the central government in the provinces where the outbreak is taking place. And that makes it really difficult to track down contacts of people with documented illness. And if you can't track

down the contacts and provide them with the vaccine, then, you know, the outbreak can continue to spread and you can lose track of it. And these are highly mobile populations. I would say we're fortunate in that the epidemic is largely confined to three adjacent health zones. So it's still pretty concentrated. But cases actually have now spread out across multiple provinces into Uganda and in an in an area that is a little bit bigger than Newfoundland, actually. So it's pretty widespread. And that creates a tremendous challenge in terms of tracking these folks down and getting them the help they need.

I have to let you go. But that speaks to the urgency of the work that you're doing, right? In terms of, yes, getting the vaccine out to people, but also just developing a vaccine that will work to fight this. I think so. Thanks so much, Matt. Good to talk to you. Richard Hatchet is the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation.

It's known as CEPI. We reached him in Surrey, England. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.