New York doctor who survived Ebola says he fears for healthcare workers treating the virus

A New York doctor who contracted and survived Ebola more than a decade ago says he’s worried about health care workers who are at the center of treating the virus. latest epidemic in a remote province in eastern Congo.

“Healthcare workers are the group that really concerns me because they’ve had very close contact with people when they’re most contagious, especially at the time of their death,” Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor of public health at Brown University, told CBS News on Friday.

Authorities in eastern Congo’s Ituri province are grappling with a new suspected Ebola outbreak with at least 246 cases, including 65 deaths, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday.

This is the 17th Ebola outbreak in Congo since 1976. One of the worst outbreaks killed more than 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016.

“What we know very well is that the country has experience, but the region where this is happening is very unstable with the current humanitarian situation and the population moving from South Sudan to Uganda and other areas,” Dr. Abdi Rahman Mahamud, director of health emergency alert and response operations at the World Health Organization, said at a press conference on Friday.

Spencer contracted Ebola while working with the nonprofit group Doctors Without Borders in Guinea in September 2014. He spent three weeks in Guinea working with Ebola patients.

When he returned to New York the following month and arrived home on October 17, 2014, he said he began self-monitoring, taking his temperature twice a day.

Then, on October 23, 2014, a little less than a week after returning home, he developed a fever and was rushed by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital, a designated Ebola treatment center at the time.

Health authorities tested and decontaminated his apartment, and his then-fiancee and two friends were quarantined.

“The one I was infected with, the Zaire strain, seems to have the highest mortality, but they all produce fairly similar symptoms of fatigue. [that] ultimately leads to vomiting, diarrhea, incredible weakness and weight loss,” Spencer said.

He was hospitalized in Bellevue for 19 days and has fully recovered. He was treated with a combination of antiviral and experimental treatments, as well as blood transfusions from an Ebola survivor.

“Let me tell you, 19 days alone in a room, except for a small window, a small screen… and providers who come in several times a day dressed in spacesuits. That’s your only human interaction,” Spencer said. “But I’m lucky, because I’m alive, and the majority of people who have been infected with Ebola are not, especially those I was caring for in West Africa and Guinea at that time.”

According to CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Céline Gounder, the latest outbreak is believed to be caused by a strain known as Bundibugyo ebolavirus, or BDV. Gounder says this strain has only been responsible for two previously known outbreaks, a 2007 outbreak in Uganda with 55 cases and an outbreak in Congo in 2012 with 57 cases.

She said there is no approved vaccine or treatment for BDV.

“Healthcare professionals seem very concerned about the possibility or ability to contain this,” Gounder said. “This is already a significant outbreak by the time we hear about it. There have already been a number of deaths. And this is a strain of Ebola for which we have no treatment, no vaccine.”

The Africa CDC said that of only 20 samples tested so far, 13 have been confirmed positive.

The United States was in the past the main external actor in the response to the Ebola epidemic, but experts are now concerned about the impact of the measures taken by the Trump administration. dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development And its withdrawal of the United States to the World Health Organization.

Spencer said he thought it was possible there was a connection between the USAID shutdown and the fact that the latest outbreak wasn’t officially announced until Friday. He said it was also concerning that the White House did not have a director for its Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Gerald Parker, whom Trump exploited run the office in February 2025, resigned later that year and the position remains unfilled.

“Right now we don’t have that capacity,” he said of responding quickly to global outbreaks. “We don’t have a director or anyone in the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. We don’t have anyone to coordinate the entire State Department and the CDC, or our relationships with foreign actors and the WHO. We’ve gotten rid of a lot of those lessons that we learned the hard way over the last decade and over the last five years.”

Before the Trump administration’s latest moves, Spencer said, the United States likely would have had officials from USAID and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the ground in Congo before the outbreak.

“Before the second Trump administration, USAID would have been on the ground,” Spencer said. “The CDC would have been on the ground at any time, perhaps even before another Ebola outbreak, because we were in a number of countries. We built relationships beforehand.”

Despite these problems, Spencer said he believes the United States is still capable of dealing with a virus like Ebola, which he said “is not very good at spreading” despite its high mortality rate. He noted the US response this month to the deadly hantavirus epidemic on a Dutch cruise ship. Eighteen Americans who were aboard the ship are currently being monitored in a quarantine unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

“We’ve seen in the last couple of weeks the national quarantine unit that we have in Nebraska and the dozen centers that we have across the United States that are capable of handling very high-consequence pathogens like hantavirus and Ebola,” Spencer said. “These are all commitments we made as a country, not least and in part because of cases like mine a decade ago.”