CREID centers were involved in the development of reagents and diagnostic tests, which were lacking on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Public health agencies failed to detect early infections because the tests used were designed to detect the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, responsible for previous outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus.
CREID was likely targeted because of its loose connections to the COVID-19 lab leak theory espoused by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. one of his originals centers was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a former American nonprofit that became a flashpoint for conspiracy theories about origins of COVID-19 due to its ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Under Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services permanently banned EcoHealth Alliance receives taxpayer money in January 2025. The White House also aforementioned EcoHealth’s connections to the Wuhan laboratory as a reason to dissolve the United States Agency for International Development.
Neither HHS nor the White House responded to a request for comment.
Andersen’s center in West Africa focused on the Ebola virus and the Lassa virus. Another CREID site in Nairobi, Kenya, focused on other infectious diseases, but played a key role in responding to a September 2022 Ebola outbreak in Uganda. And its former leader says that this time it would have been part of the response and would have been based on research from other centers in the network.
“We had active studies there. We were covering East and Central Africa. We would have been there,” says M. Kariuki Njenga, a virologist at Washington State University who led the CREID center in East and Central Africa.
CREID centers worked with local collaborators to boost disease surveillance and provide support for outbreak investigations. During the 2022 outbreak, rapid case detection and effective contact tracing led Uganda to declare the outbreak just four months after it began.
In total, 164 people were infected and 55 died as a result. outbreak. The current outbreak is already responsible At least 1,000 suspected cases and 238 suspected deaths have been recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with seven confirmed cases, including one death, in neighboring Uganda.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, has expressed concern about the speed at which the outbreak is growing. “We are urgently scaling up operations,” he said this week during an African Union online meeting, “but right now the epidemic is overtaking us.”
This story originally appeared on WIRED.com.
