CBS News98%
Examining past Ebola outbreaks and efforts to stop current outbreak 75%
5/26/2026, 11:47:47 PM
BS Summary: This video contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Availability Heuristic, and Framing Effect, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 43.5% saturation with 375 hits. Analysis detected 1,925 faulty-reasoning hits from 863 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 66.7% and a BS Rank of 75% (5,580 of 21,886 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 74.50% of the video peer group.
The World Health Organization warned Monday the spread of the Ebola outbreak is quote outpacing efforts to contain it.
There have been more than 200 suspected deaths and 900 cases so far in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.
Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stressed the overall risk to the American public remains low.
But the outbreak has alarmed public health experts who are urging countries bordering Uganda and DRC to engage in enhanced surveillance, including contact tracing and creating rapid response teams to investigate reported cases.
Ebola outbreaks are not common, but when they occur, they can be deadly.
The first documented outbreak started in 1976, and more than 600 people were infected in two simultaneous epidemics in DRC and Sudan that year.
According to the CDC, scientists observed patients dying of a disease that caused severe fevers and damaged the body's ability to regulate itself, which they ident eventually identified as Ebola, named for the river near the village where it was discovered.
The next serious outbreak was in 1995, also in DRC, with more than 300 people becoming infected.
During the 2000s, outbreaks impacted hundreds of people in Uganda and DRC.
But the most severe outbreak since the disease's discovery, impacted 10 countries, including the US, infecting more than 28,000 people and killing more than 11,000 from 2014 to 2016.
According to the World Health Organization, the most recent major outbreak began in 2018 and infected nearly 3,500 people over a 2-year period.
WHO officials said the outbreak was challenging to contain because it spread in conflictaffected areas.
So health officials had trouble reaching and treating the ait infected.
This current outbreak is believed to have also begun in a conflictridden province of DRC which has made it harder to combat.
CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Selene Gounder joins us now.
She's also the editor at large for public health at KFF Health News and was an aid worker during the West African Ebola epidemic.
Thank you for being here.
Now, as we mentioned, the head of the WHO says now at least 220 people are suspected to have died from this outbreak in DRC.
What are you hearing from health officials on the ground?
A major concern is having enough workforce capacity to do the contact tracing.
Only one in five contacts is currently getting the appropriate follow-up to see if they develop symptoms, if they need testing, if they need isolation and treatment.
And so that means you have four out of five contacts that might be setting off new train uh chains of transmission.
Another major issue is the risk to healthare workers of both Ebola itself uh as well as some of the resistance on the ground.
And I spoke to uh Dr. Abdu Sabu Shishe who's with the International Medical Corps in the DRC.
Uh let's take a listen.
All these combined poor infection prevention control, lack of PPE and many of the health care workers not being trained properly on infection prevention and control.
This is causing um more healthcare to be affected and it also caused more of
that is so sad to hear.
Um so on Monday Uganda reported two new Ebola cases bringing the total number of infections there to seven.
How concerned should we be about the spreading further?
Yeah, just to follow up with what Dr. Seeish was saying and and also the situation in Kala they're they're related which is healthcare workers are getting infected
and so when you don't have enough personal protective equipment gowns gloves masks that's what's going to happen you know if you don't have enough testing to know who's infected that's what's going to happen and what you also see in the local population is they're seeing doctors getting Ebola and getting sick and dying and that makes them very scared themselves to present for health care to whether it's a regular healthcare facil facility or an Ebola treatment unit.
So, the World Cup begins in just over two weeks.
What kind of impact is this having?
Um, is the outbreak having on the event and is enough being done to screen people who are going to be coming here?
Yeah, the major concern is not necessarily Ebola for the World Cup.
Um, and I want to note the DRC, their national team has actually been in Belgium for months, so they are not at risk themselves.
And there's now a number of travel restrictions uh in place which really won't allow fans to come over uh from the affected areas.
But what we are more worried about is this is the largest biggest mass gathering in US history with people from all over the world, millions involved and there's no additional funding for bop preparedness, health preparedness.
So the World Cup, could it be a super spreader event for something else?
Whether it's measles or something like MS, which is another corona virus.
We hope not, but unfortunately there hasn't been enough done to prevent that kind of thing from happening.
Dr. Slingander, thank you.
Speakers
4speakers58%attributed speech364writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
85%flagged-word coverageDr. Selene Gounder
359 attributed words72% of attributed speech83% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.