▶ Watch Video: Health officials battle new Ebola outbreak: Doctor who survived virus speaks out
A New York doctor who contracted and survived Ebola more than a decade ago says he is worried for healthcare workers who are at the center of treating the latest outbreak in a remote province of eastern Congo.
“Healthcare workers are the group that I’m really concerned about because they had very close contact with people when they’re most contagious, particularly around the time of folks’ death,” Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room physician and public health professor at Brown University, told CBS News on Friday.
Authorities in eastern Congo’s Ituri province are contending with a new Ebola outbreak that is suspected in at least 246 cases, including 65 deaths, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday.
This is the 17th Ebola outbreak in the Congo since 1976. One of the worst outbreaks killed more than 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016.
“What we know very well that the country has experience, but the region where it is happening is highly volatile with the humanitarian situation going on and the population moving around from South Sudan to Uganda and other parts,” Dr. Abdi Rahman Mahamud, World Health Organization director of health emergency alert and response operations, said during a news conference Friday.
Spencer contracted Ebola while working with the nonprofit group Doctors Without Borders in Guinea in September 2014. He was in Guinea for three weeks working with Ebola patients.
When he returned to New York City the following month, arriving home on Oct. 17, 2014, he said he began to self-monitor, taking his temperature twice a day.
Then on Oct. 23, 2014, just under a week after returning home, he developed a fever and was rushed by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital, a designated Ebola treatment center at the time.
Health officials tested and decontaminated his apartment, and his fiancée at the time and two friends were quarantined.
“The one that I was infected with, the Zaire strain, seems to have the highest mortality, but they all produce pretty similar symptoms of fatigue [that] ultimately leads to vomiting, diarrhea, incredible weakness and weight loss,” Spencer said.
He was hospitalized at Bellevue for 19 days and made a full recovery. He was treated with a combination of antiviral and experimental treatments, as well as blood transfusions from an Ebola survivor.
“Let me tell you, 19 days in a room by yourself, other than a small window, a tiny screen… and providers who came in a few times a day dressed in space suits, that’s your only human interaction,” Spencer said. “I’m lucky though, because I’m alive, and the majority of people that were infected with Ebola are not, particularly the people that I was taking care of in West Africa and Guinea at that time.”
According to CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Céline Gounder, the latest outbreak is believed to be a strain known as the Bundibugyo ebolavirus, or BDV. Gounder says that strain has only been responsible for two known outbreaks prior to this, a 2007 outbreak in Uganda with 55 cases, and an outbreak in the Congo in 2012 with 57 cases.
She said there are no approved vaccines or treatments for BDV.
“Medical professionals seem very concerned about the possibility or the ability to contain this,” Gounder said. “It’s already a big outbreak at the point that we’re hearing about it. There have already been a number of deaths. And this is a strain of Ebola for which we have no treatment, no vaccines.”
The Africa CDC reported that of only 20 samples tested so far, 13 have been confirmed positive.
The U.S. has been the single largest external player in Ebola outbreak response in the past, but now experts worry about the impact of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and its withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization.
Spencer said he believes it’s possible there’s a connection between the shutdown of USAID and the fact that the latest outbreak was not officially announced until Friday. He said it’s also concerning that the White House does not have a director for its Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Gerald Parker, who Trump tapped to run the office in February 2025, resigned later that year, and the position has remain unfilled.
“Right now, we don’t have that capacity,” he said of responding quickly to global outbreaks. “We don’t have a director or anyone in the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. We don’t have anyone coordinating across the State Department and the CDC, and our relations with foreign actors and the WHO. We’ve gotten rid of a lot of those lessons we learned the hard way over the past decade, and over the past five years.”
Prior to the latest moves by the Trump administration, Spencer said, the U.S. would have likely had USAID and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials on the ground in the Congo before the outbreak.
“Before the second Trump administration, USAID would have been on the ground,” Spencer said. “The CDC would have been on the ground at a moment’s notice, maybe even before a moment’s notice of a new outbreak of Ebola because we were in a bunch of countries. We created relationships beforehand.”
Despite those issues, though, Spencer said he believes the U.S. is still capable of dealing with a virus like Ebola, which he says “is not that great at spreading” despite its high mortality rate. He noted the U.S. response this month to the deadly hantavirus outbreak on a Dutch cruise ship. Eighteen Americans who were aboard the ship are currently being monitored in a quarantine unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
“We’ve seen over the past couple weeks with the National Quarantine Unit we have in Nebraska and the over a dozen centers that we have around the U.S. that are capable of taking care of very high consequence pathogens like hantavirus and Ebola,” Spencer said. “These were all commitments that we made as a country, particularly and partly because of cases like my own a decade ago.”