Africa: Ebola's Long Shadow Over the World Cup

On May 30, as football fans around the world counted down to the start of the FIFA World Cup in North America and airlines prepared for the annual surge in summer travel, the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was sitting in Bunia, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, listening to community leaders describe a very different reality.

Religious leaders, youth representatives, women's groups and local officials had gathered to discuss a disease that has haunted Central Africa for decades but continues to unsettle the rest of the world whenever it reappears: Ebola. The timing could hardly have been worse.

A few days earlier, Uganda had tightened extraordinary measures along its 800km-long western border with DRC, announcing restrictions on cross-border movement following what officials described as the continued escalation of the Ebola outbreak in Ituri Province.

Similarly, the United States, Canada and Mexico, the joint hosts of this year's global football jamboree, had unveiled coordinated public health travel measures ahead of the FIFA World Cup, citing the need to protect millions of expected visitors as well as their own populations.

Thousands of kilometres away, diplomats, epidemiologists, aviation authorities and public health officials were asking variations of the same question: Could the current Ebola outbreak become something much bigger? The concern is not merely about the number of cases.

Dr Jean Kaseya, the Director-General of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention told a continental ministerial meeting on May 25 that more than 3,500 contacts were already being monitored across affected areas in Uganda and the DRC. In DRC, contact tracing operations had expanded across seven of the eight affected health zones in Ituri Province, while governments and international partners pledged close to US$500 million toward response efforts.

To Dr Kaseya, the figures illustrated both the scale of the challenge and the urgency of the response. "Our responsibility is clear," he said. "Stand with the countries leading the response and protect those who risk their lives to protect us."

But beneath the declarations of solidarity lies a deeper anxiety that extends far beyond Central Africa. Unlike previous outbreaks involving the Zaire strain of Ebola virus, scientists have confirmed that the current epidemic is being driven by Bundibugyo Ebola virus, one of the rarest forms of the disease ever documented.

First identified in Uganda in 2007, the strain has caused only a handful of known outbreaks