A New York physician who survived Ebola a decade ago says he is deeply worried for health workers confronting a new outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and public health professor at Brown University, told CBS News that frontline clinicians face the greatest danger because they have very close contact with patients when viral shedding and contagion are highest, especially around the time of death.
Authorities say the outbreak in Ituri province is suspected in roughly 246 cases with about 65 deaths, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported. The region is volatile and sees frequent population movement between neighboring countries, a factor the World Health Organization’s Dr. Abdi Rahman Mahamud said complicates containment and response.
Early laboratory work suggests the strain involved is Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDV). Medical experts note BDV has prompted only two prior known outbreaks — a 2007 event in Uganda with about 55 cases and a 2012 outbreak in the Congo with roughly 57 cases — and there are no approved vaccines or specific treatments for this strain. Of about 20 samples tested so far, 13 have been confirmed positive.
Spencer described his own experience contracting Ebola in Guinea in September 2014 while working with Doctors Without Borders. He returned to New York in mid-October, began self-monitoring, then developed fever and was admitted to Bellevue Hospital on Oct. 23, 2014. He spent 19 days isolated in hospital and recovered after receiving a mix of antiviral and experimental therapies plus transfusions of blood from an Ebola survivor.
“That was 19 days in a room by yourself, your only human interaction through small windows and providers coming in covered head to toe,” Spencer recalled, adding that he considers himself fortunate because many people infected in West Africa at that time did not survive.
Spencer warned that global response capacity has weakened in recent years, citing the dismantling of some U.S. international public health capabilities and the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization. He noted the absence of a director for the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response — the post filled briefly in 2025 by Gerald Parker, who later resigned — and said those gaps may delay faster international assistance that historically would have placed USAID and CDC teams on the ground early in an outbreak.
Despite these concerns, Spencer said the United States still maintains specialized quarantine and treatment units — including a national quarantine unit in Nebraska and more than a dozen centers able to treat high-consequence pathogens — and that Ebola’s mode of transmission makes it less efficient at spreading than some other pathogens, though its mortality can be high.
Public health officials continue to monitor the situation in Ituri, prioritize testing and case-finding, and urge protections for health workers and communities while response teams mobilize to contain the outbreak.