Virunga Park deploys checkpoints and rangers to contain Ebola spread in eastern DRC

In the dense forests of eastern Congo, where armed conflict has raged for more than two decades, a different kind of battle is now underway. Virunga National Park—Africa's oldest protected area and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980—has become a frontline in the fight against Ebola. As cases continue to emerge across the Democratic Republic of the Congo and into Uganda, the park's leadership has mobilized an emergency response that treats the vast forest itself as both shield and checkpoint, a natural barrier that can slow the virus's movement if managed with precision.

The current outbreak, the DRC's seventeenth, has already killed more than 1,400 people. It arrived as the country was still recovering from its tenth outbreak, which ravaged North Kivu and Ituri provinces between 2018 and 2020, claiming nearly 2,300 lives. In May, the World Health Organization declared the situation a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Emmanuel de Merode, the park's director-general, sees Virunga's role as essential. The park stretches across 300 kilometers of protected forest in North Kivu, a natural corridor where human settlement is sparse. That emptiness, paradoxically, becomes a tool. "Protected areas such as Virunga National Park are vast natural spaces where there are no human populations," de Merode explained. "They act as barriers to the spread of the disease."

The park has established six health checkpoints within and around its territory, each equipped with handwashing stations, thermometers for temperature screening, and first-level isolation centers. Forty paramedics and eighty rangers have been deployed as part of an initial six-month emergency response. The checkpoints function as roadblocks on routes crossing the park, allowing authorities to monitor who moves through the protected area and to catch potential cases before they travel further. In Ituri province, where the outbreak has been most severe, three checkpoints north and south of Bunia, the provincial capital, screen travelers arriving from the hardest-hit zones. Two suspected cases have already been identified at these checkpoints and referred to public health authorities for follow-up.

De Merode emphasized that the park's contribution extends beyond physical barriers. During the 2018-2020 outbreak, members of the response committee credited Virunga with preventing the disease from spreading southward or eastward—keeping it from reaching Goma and other parts of the country. The park has also supported the health service directly, providing protective equipment, body bags, thermometers, and vehicles to regions where health services faced severe shortages when the outbreak began. All information collected at the checkpoints is transmitted immediately to the Congolese National Institute of Public Health, feeding into the broader surveillance system led by Congolese health authorities.

But Virunga's emergency response carries another dimension, one that speaks to the interconnectedness of human and animal health. The park is home to one of the world's last populations of mountain gorillas—endangered great apes with a global population estimated at just over 1,000 across the Greater Virunga Landscape, which spans the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda. Mountain gorillas share more than 90 percent of their DNA with humans, making them susceptible to many of the same infectious diseases that afflict people, including Ebola. Eddy Syaluha, a veterinarian with Gorilla Doctors, a conservation organization working across the region, explained the vulnerability plainly: the biological closeness that makes gorillas so fascinating to humans also makes them fragile in the face of human pathogens.

Previous Ebola outbreaks in Central Africa have demonstrated the catastrophic impact the virus can have on great apes. Studies have documented mortality rates exceeding 90 percent among western lowland gorilla populations. Yet in Virunga National Park and elsewhere in the DRC, no mountain gorilla has ever contracted Ebola, despite repeated outbreaks over the past five decades. That record exists because of deliberate prevention and surveillance. Conservation teams monitor gorilla health continuously and screen visitors to reduce the risk of human-to-animal transmission. Syaluha described the work as rooted in what public health experts call a One Health approach—the recognition that human, animal, and environmental health are fundamentally interconnected.

"We are doing everything we can to ensure that what happened in other countries does not happen to our gorillas here," Syaluha said. The focus remains on prevention centered on humans, on keeping the virus away from the forest before it can reach the animals. The checkpoints, the paramedics, the rangers, the screening stations—they all serve a dual purpose. They protect the communities living near and within the park's boundaries. And they protect a species that has survived poaching, habitat loss, and decades of regional instability, but which remains profoundly vulnerable to a virus that moves through human populations and could, if it crossed into the forest, devastate what little remains.