Category: News

NAIROBI, Kenya — Reported Ebola cases have surged above 1,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and health experts are warning this could be one of the worst outbreaks, rivaling the largest on record, which killed 11,365 people in West Africa from 2014 to 2016.

On Wednesday, French officials announced the country’s first case of Ebola from this outbreak — a doctor who had traveled to Congo on a humanitarian mission. The doctor was being treated at a special medical facility and was reported to be in stable condition, according to a statement from the French Health Ministry.

With more than 250 confirmed deaths in Africa, the World Health Organization said Tuesday that the current outbreak, first reported in May, has the largest number of confirmed cases during the first month of any Ebola outbreak in Africa.

There have been 17 outbreaks since the discovery of the virus in 1976, involving three strains. The current strain, Bundibugyo, has been seen only twice before, in 2007 in Uganda and in 2017 in Congo. There is no specific treatment or vaccine for it.

“None of those previous outbreaks had the magnitude of the volume of cases and geographical spread that we are seeing today,” said Manuel Albela, an epidemiologist with Doctors Without Borders who is working with the Ebola response team.

“And even that comparison — again, one month into the declaration of the outbreak — it falls short, because we have never seen almost 900 confirmed cases just after one month of the declaration of the outbreak,” Albela said. “Going back to the comparison with the outbreak in West Africa, it’s a very similar situation because we don’t have a specific treatment for this specific virus.”

Diagnosing Bundibugyo is complicated, because there is no specific test kit for the rare strain and this is one reason the strain initially spread fast without detection.

The virus is now present in at least three eastern provinces in Congo. Ituri province, the epicenter, has recorded 954 confirmed cases, with 91 more in North Kivu province and three in South Kivu province, according to government data released Sunday, with 267 people reported dead.

In neighboring Uganda, 20 infections and two deaths have been reported.

Misinformation and distrust about the virus have complicated the response, leading many infected people to refuse treatment.

Health workers have been attacked during contact tracing and when relatives are denied access to the infected bodies of their loved ones.

On Friday, in the Mambangu neighborhood of Beni, angry residents attacked workers who went to disinfect the home of someone who died of Ebola, according to said Serge Kambale, 39, a doctor who spoke to the Washington Post by phone from the city.

During the incident, two workers were injured when the locals started throwing stones at them. Fabrice Kavono, a witness, said that the crowd attacked the health workers and accused them of fabricating the disease for material gain.

“It is the second time Ebola is in Beni, but they say it’s in Bunia and Mongbwalu only and that they are making it up here to make money,” Kavono said.

Another witness told the Post that people with relatives in Mongbwalu, the mining town in Ituri province at the center of the outbreak, were fleeing in droves to relatives in parts of North and South Kivu — spreading the virus as they traveled.

Onesphore Bangenza, the leader of the Ebola Response Team in Bunia for Mercy Corps, a nonprofit group, said that burials in which relatives insisted on washing bodies of loved ones and touching them were still happening, and that residents were not adhering to distancing guidelines.

“We have motor taxis transporting more than three people,” Bangenza said. “There are people who do not want to be tested. The scale of the outbreak could be larger.”

In May, 30 people who had exhibited Ebola-like symptoms died at a displacement camp in Kigonze that hosts families fleeing conflict in the region, Reuters reported.

Two aid workers confirmed that 13 deaths had been reported at the camp within 48 hours and that more 30 total deaths were expected.

“The constant movement and overcrowding of refugees in camps is causing fear that this virus could spread even more and the scale of the outbreak may grow” Bangenza said, adding that conditions in the camps were abysmal. “No water, no latrines,” he said. “The hygiene condition is very, very bad.”

New Ebola cases have been reported in cities such as Beni where an ISIS-affiliated rebel group, the Allied Democratic Forces, has waged attacks, prompting families to flee their homes.

At a local hospital in Beni, a patient admitted with malaria asked to be discharged early because he feared that others at the hospital would have Ebola and infect him, he told the Post. While he was in the hospital, the ADF attacked an area near the hospital, killing seven people.

“First, I was afraid that because I exhibited malaria symptoms, which are similar to Ebola, I would be assimilated with people with Ebola,” the patient said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private health matters. “In the small hospital, there is no clear follow-up, so anything can happen. Then, the attack scared me more.”

Congo has been besieged by years of conflict especially in the mineral-rich eastern regions of the country, which boast the world’s largest deposits of coltan and cobalt, used to manufacture electronics.

Cycles of violence have also weakened health systems in the region.

Just last week, protests broke out in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, after people learned of a proposal to change the constitution to allow an extension of term limits, which would allow President Félix Tshisekedi to stay beyond his current term, which was supposed to be his last.

The Rwanda-affiliated M23 rebel group was working with health teams after two cases of Ebola were discovered in Goma, a city that M23 controls, the group’s deputy spokesperson, Oscar Balinda, told The Post. M23 controls large swaths of territory in eastern DRC.

The United States has sent $375 million in aid, so far, to contain this latest Ebola outbreak, Trump said during a recent Group of Seven meeting in France.

Experts say more must be done contain the outbreak.

“One of the key factors to try to control an outbreak of Ebola is to decentralize as much as possible the testing capacity, so that the tests can be done in the places where the cases are,” said Abela, the epidemiologist. “And I think that this, little by little, is happening. But, as usual, we want things to happen yesterday.”

Abela also said that contact-tracing is crucial but not enough is being done. “At the moment, I think there are 70 percent of the contacts being followed up when the target is normally 95 percent, according to the DRC authorities.”

He added: “This is clearly one of the gaps.”

In his battle to clean the murky waters of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, President Donald Trump has tried draining, painting, hydrogen peroxide, and what the Interior Department describes as “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology.” But he has seemingly overlooked two of the most important factors that experts say are driving unsightly — and sometimes dangerous — profusions of algae: pollution and climate change.

Algae thrive in warm, still waters, causing populations to explode as global temperatures rise, said environmental engineer Steve Chapra, an emeritus professor at Tufts University.

Meanwhile, rampant human development has increased the amount of fertilizer and sewage produced by farms and cities, and severe storms intensified by the warmer atmosphere are causing more of these pollutants to run off into local waterways — providing algae with the nutrients they need to grow.

In a 2017 study, Chapra and his colleagues projected that climate change would cause a more than fivefold increase in the number of days when U.S. water bodies are affected by harmful algal blooms.

Short-term measures like those Trump has pursued may temporarily reduce algae populations in some water bodies, Chapra said. But unless they grapple with warming and nutrient pollution, any efforts to address these blooms in the Reflecting Pool and elsewhere are doomed to fail in the long run.

The consequences could be profound, because the problems presented by blooms go far beyond aesthetics, he added. They can disrupt aquatic food chains, deplete oxygen in water bodies and even produce deadly toxins.

“It’s probably the biggest water quality problem in the world,” Chapra said. “The Reflecting Pool is the canary in the coal mine.”

A spokesperson for the Interior Department did not respond to questions about whether the department had considered nutrient pollution or water temperature in planning the pool’s refurbishment. In an email, the agency reiterated that the National Park Service is using hydrogen peroxide and ozone nanobubbles, which break up algae by damaging their cells.

The root causes of blooms

Algal blooms have long thrived in the Reflecting Pool, thanks to stagnant, shallow water enriched by pollution and warmed by sweltering D.C. summers.

Since 2012, the pool has been filled from the Tidal Basin, which in turn is fed by the Potomac River. Both water bodies contain excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous — the nutrients most loved by algae — and are designated as “impaired” by the Environmental Protection Agency, meaning they don’t meet basic water quality standards for swimming, fishing, and supporting aquatic life.

Trump said his $14 million renovation this spring would clean the pool’s algae-clouded waters by sealing leaks and painting the bottom “American flag blue.”

But the refurbishment didn’t address the pollution that is the root cause of algal growth, said Hans Paerl, an aquatic ecologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The pool was refilled on June 4 using the same nutrient-rich Tidal Basin water as before.

The spate of warm, sunny days that followed — June so far has been about 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal, according to the National Weather Service — provided ideal conditions for the photosynthetic creatures to multiply. Those high temperatures may have been exacerbated by the pool’s new dark blue coating, which absorbs more heat than its previous gray finish, Chapra said.

Within days, satellite data showed that the Reflecting Pool contained more algae than at any recorded point in June for at least five years.

The bloom that turned the pool green shortly after it was refilled was likely caused by a single-celled organism called cyanobacteria, Paerl said. Pictures of the pool showed a characteristic bright green scum coating the surface of the water.

Cyanobacteria blooms are the most dangerous, Paerl said, because they produce toxic compounds that can cause rashes, vomiting, and neurological problems in people who touch or ingest them.

After the Interior Department treated the pool with hydrogen peroxide, which breaks down cyanobacteria’s cell membrane and disrupts photosynthesis, the cyanobacteria bloom seemed to wane.

But the water’s sickly green sheen remains. Aquatic ecologist Rosalina Christova, a George Mason University researcher who acquired a sample from the Reflecting Pool on June 15, found that the water had been colonized by a genus of multicellular green algae called Desmodesmus. In an email, she called the population “very dense.”

The green algae are more resistant to the effects of hydrogen peroxide, and they were likely able to capitalize on the nutrients released from the disintegrating bodies of the slain cyanobacteria, Paerl said.

“This created a niche for another player, so to speak,” he said. “Nutrients keep cycling through there and feed whatever blooms.”

A growing global threat

Though the administration’s concerns about algae in the Reflecting Pool are in part cosmetic, the proliferation of blooms in waterways across the planet pose a significant — and growing — threat, said Joaquim Goes, a biogeochemist at Columbia University.

By studying satellite images of the ocean, he found that microalgae scums — caused by the same tiny organisms as those afflicting the Reflecting Pool — have expanded at a rate of 1% per year since 2003. The phenomenon has disrupted food chains and created oxygenless “dead zones” where fish can’t survive.

“It is spreading like wildfire all over the world,” Goes said. “And there is no question that temperature is playing a role.”

Blooms are also increasing in freshwater bodies that supply people’s drinking water, research shows.

A 2022 EPA assessment found that 49% of U.S. lakes showed excess amounts of chlorophyll a, the photosynthetic compound that indicates presence of cyanobacteria and green algae. Detections of microcystins, a class of toxin produced by cyanobacteria, increased by almost 30 percentage points since the previous assessment was conducted five years earlier.

Massive cyanobacteria blooms have poisoned important fisheries, such as in Lake Erie. They can imperil important ecosystems, like the Everglades below Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. They have been linked to the deaths of dogs, cattle and, in rare cases, humans.

Even green algae, which do not produce toxins, can clog filtration systems and disrupt drinking water supplies. When they die, the decomposition of their bodies depletes oxygen in the surrounding water, killing other aquatic life.

The National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimates that phenomenon causes an average $50 million in damage to the U.S. economy each year. Individual severe events can cause even greater harm: An unprecedented “red tide” cost roughly $2.7 billion in decreased tourism revenue when it forced the closure of beaches across southern Florida in 2018.

Lasting solutions

Theories about the persistence of the Reflecting Pool algae abound.

The Interior Department has blamed residual organisms that remained in supply lines after the renovation. Some have speculated that the recent blooms are a product of liberal “sabotage.”

The Trump administration has said it plans to drain the pool again to address algae growth and paint that is peeling from its bottom.

But those measures are unlikely to prevent algae from reemerging, said environmental engineer Victor Bierman, a retired water quality consultant and former EPA scientist.

As summer heat continues to ramp up, he worries the green algae could be replaced by cyanobacteria, which have no predators and readily outcompete other microbes at high temperatures.

“You can get rid of an existing bloom, but if you don’t change the underlying conditions … you’re going to grow more algae,” Bierman said.

Officials could stymie growth by increasing the flow of water through the pool, but that would disrupt the still surface needed for it to be reflective, he added. A better option would be installing an enhanced filtration system that removes nutrients from the Tidal Basin water before it is pumped into the pool.

Ultimately, said Chapra, algae blooms will continue to plague the Reflecting Pool and countless other water bodies until people address the human-made problems of nutrient runoff and climate change.

“If you don’t follow the science, then you think it’s magic or espionage, and it’s not,” Chapra said. “This is basic biology.”