Ebola Survivor Warns of Healthcare Worker Risks Amid New Congo Outbreak

Craig Spencer was alone in a hospital room at Bellevue for nineteen days, separated from the world by a small window and a thin screen. The only human contact came from medical staff moving through the door in what he describes as space suits—protective gear so complete it rendered them almost unrecognizable. It was October 2014, and Spencer, an emergency room physician, had returned to New York City just six days earlier from Guinea, where he had spent three weeks treating Ebola patients as a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders. A fever on October 23rd changed everything. He was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, tested positive, and became the focus of a public health response that included the decontamination of his apartment and the quarantine of his fiancée and two friends.

Spencer survived. Most people infected with Ebola do not. He was treated with antiviral drugs, experimental therapies, and blood transfusions from another survivor. When he emerged from isolation, he carried with him a visceral understanding of what the virus does to the body—the fatigue that builds into vomiting, diarrhea, profound weakness, and catastrophic weight loss. He also carried something else: a clear-eyed view of who bears the greatest risk when Ebola spreads. "Healthcare workers are the group that I'm really concerned about," he told CBS News on Friday, "because they had very close contact with people when they're most contagious, particularly around the time of folks' death."

That concern is not abstract. In the Ituri province of eastern Congo, health authorities are now managing what they believe to be at least 246 suspected cases of Ebola, with 65 deaths confirmed as of Friday. This is the seventeenth outbreak to strike the Congo since 1976. The 2014-2016 West African epidemic, which Spencer witnessed firsthand, killed more than 11,000 people. But this new outbreak carries a particular complication: the strain identified is Bundibugyo ebolavirus, or BDV, a variant for which there are no approved vaccines and no proven treatments. Of the twenty samples tested so far, thirteen have come back positive. Medical professionals are alarmed. "It's already a big outbreak at the point that we're hearing about it," said Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News's medical correspondent. "There have already been a number of deaths. And this is a strain of Ebola for which we have no treatment, no vaccines."

The timing of the outbreak's announcement—Friday, after it had already spread to at least 246 suspected cases—troubles Spencer for reasons that extend beyond the virus itself. The United States has historically been the largest external actor in Ebola response, deploying USAID personnel and CDC officials to affected regions often before an outbreak is even officially declared. That capacity has contracted sharply. USAID has been shut down. The United States has withdrawn from the World Health Organization. The White House's Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response, a position created in response to lessons learned from past epidemics, remains unfilled after its director resigned in 2025. "Right now, we don't have that capacity," Spencer said. "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."

Spencer is careful not to overstate the threat. Ebola, he notes, "is not that great at spreading," despite its lethality. The United States retains designated treatment centers—he pointed to the national quarantine unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and more than a dozen similar facilities across the country, all built partly in response to his own case a decade ago. The country's infrastructure for managing high-consequence pathogens remains intact. But the early warning systems, the relationships built over years of presence in vulnerable regions, the coordination mechanisms that allowed rapid deployment—those have been dismantled or allowed to atrophy. "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."

The Ituri province itself presents additional obstacles. The region is volatile, marked by ongoing humanitarian crises and population movement across borders into South Sudan, Uganda, and beyond. Healthcare workers there operate under constraints that their American counterparts do not face. They are the ones who will absorb the greatest risk—the ones who will be closest to patients at their most contagious, at the moment of death. Spencer knows what that exposure means. He also knows what it means to survive it, and to carry the weight of having survived when so many others did not.