2 June 2026 Articles

New Ebola outbreak highlights a painful lesson: preparedness comes too late

World View in Nature by Professor of Virology Kevin Ariën

Six years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world seems less, not better prepared for new outbreaks. This is what Professor of Virology Kevin Ariën writes in a World View in Nature. The catalyst is the rapidly growing Ebola outbreak in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), caused by the Bundibugyo Ebola virus.

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014–2016 was followed by a wave of new diagnostic tools, treatments and vaccines.
Yet today, healthcare workers once again have to fight an outbreak with insufficient resources. The available diagnostics are too limited, reach the field too slowly and focus too heavily on the Zaire Ebola virus.
This outbreak must serve as a wake-up call to the world: invest in pandemic preparedness before an outbreak occurs, not when it is already spreading.

The first known case of the current outbreak, a healthcare worker, developed symptoms on 24 April and later died in Bunia. Yet the authorities did not announce the outbreak until 15 May. In the meantime, the regional health centre was unable to identify the virus, as it only had a system capable of detecting the Zaire Ebola virus. This exposes a significant weakness: eastern Congo knows Ebola well, yet the available tests did not recognise the Bundibugyo virus.

As early as 2019, Kevin Ariën and colleagues from ITM and the Congolese Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale (INRB) warned in Nature that Ebola diagnostics were insufficiently available in the places where they are most needed. Following the major Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014–2016, new diagnostic tools, treatments and vaccines emerged. However, this progress is reaching the field too slowly today and is too heavily focused on the Zaire Ebola virus.

The new outbreak serves as a reminder of the warnings from back then. Even ten years after the 2014-2016 outbreak, the world still lacks a widely applicable diagnostic platform for different Ebola viruses, including Bundibugyo.

Ariën, K. K. (2026). Better diagnostics could have limited this Ebola outbreak. Nature, 654, 9. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01724-0

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