Is the Ebola emergency declaration in Congo too late?

On Wednesday July 17, 2019, the World Health Organization declared the yearlong Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a global health emergency.

One team of scientists had a particularly vested interest in that decision: the medical researchers at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) at Boston University, who began working on samples of the Ebola virus on year ago.

Ongoing wars and conflicts in Congo have complicated the WHO’s decision to declare a global health emergency, says Nahid Bhadelia, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at the School of Medicine at Boston University and the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit at Boston Medical Center who runs NEIDL’s medical response program. But, she adds that the decision was overdue considering that the outbreak has raged since last August and infected at least 2,500 people and killed nearly 1,700.

“I don’t envy the position they were in,” she says. “If you asked me if they waited too long, I think they did.”

Here, Bhadelia and John Connor, an associate professor of microbiology, talk about the outbreak—the second largest in history—as well as about progress in researching ways to better fight and contain the Ebola virus worldwide:

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