By Ahmed Aboulenein and Michael Erman
WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – The U.S. said on Friday it would give an additional $38 million in funding for Ebola response efforts, as the U.S. CDC warned that without strong public health interventions, the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo could match or surpass the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak.
The additional funds bring the total committed by the U.S. so far to more than $200 million in direct funding, the State Department said in a statement.
The department, which did not detail how the money would be spent, said it was working closely with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the DRC and Uganda to “mount a rapid and comprehensive response” to the outbreak.
The CDC published on Friday three official scientific reports on the outbreak, in part to marshal resources for the response across the international community, Dr. Satish Pillai, the incident manager for the agency’s Ebola response, said in a briefing.
The current Ebola outbreak in the DRC has resulted in 344 confirmed cases of the disease and 60 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
CDC model scenarios show that without strong public health interventions, the outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola in the DRC could become as large as, or even larger than, the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak, the agency said.
In modeled scenarios where a low number of patients isolate sufficiently, the outbreak could become one of the largest ever documented, said Jason Asher, director of CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics.
The State Department says U.S. citizens exposed to the virus but with no symptoms would be quarantined in Kenya at a facility it is building.
(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington and Michael Erman in New York; Additional reporting by David Ljunggren in Ottawa and Bhargav Acharya in Toronto; Editing by Ryan Patrick Jones, Aurora Ellis and Nia Williams)
By Ahmed Aboulenein and Michael Erman | Reuters | © Copyright Thomson Reuters 2026.
