July 28, 2026
“There are a lot of customs, but traditionally, funerals are multi-day affairs. . . . which sometimes could take one, two or three days, where people are living close to the dead body.”
“These burial rituals must change. Local authorities … have limited the size of funerals.”
– NPR, “Why are people attacking Ebola clinics? It revolves around trust, death and body bags,” May 29, 2026
Over the past two months, headlines from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have raised alarms about another Ebola outbreak: specifically the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no approved treatment or vaccine. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, it is the seventeenth Ebola outbreak recorded in DRC since the virus was first identified in 1976. To date, more than 700 Congolese have died from the virus and the outbreak has spread into neighboring Uganda. In mid-May, the World Health Organization declared it a “public health emergency of international concern,” noting that “the ongoing insecurity, humanitarian crisis, high population mobility, the urban or semi-urban nature of the current hotspot and the large network of informal healthcare facilities further compound the risk of spread.”
Though different from COVID-19 with its global scale, the Ebola outbreak, its deadly impact, the uncertainty surrounding its transmission, and the pressing social concerns regarding proper care of the dead overlap in important ways with critical themes of our research on COVID death, mourning, and memorialization. The news from the DRC also illustrates the costs of the current administration’s withdrawal of aid and its continued undermining of medical and public health expertise. Even as COVID fades into the backdrop of American public discourse, its traces persist—especially in how we, as a society, understand and relate to more recent public health crises.
Funeral practice
For example, RIM teams members immediately recognized in the words of Congolese doctors, politicians, mourners, and aid workers how quickly fear centers on the dead—that is, the body as a vector of infection and the ritual acts of funerals and burials as superspreader events. Our project originally developed from basic questions of how rituals and thus social worlds were transformed by the pandemic’s prohibitions—and the fear, anger, sorrow, and misinformation that followed. We heard similar themes explored in the media coverage that followed reports of mourners storming local clinics.
EMANUEL: The goal is to explain what makes a safe burial. Micaela Serafini of Doctors Without Borders says aid groups have also learned from past outbreaks. One major problem her team identified?
MICAELA SERAFINI: We were putting the body inside a black bag, and we were zipping it. There was no image, so the family couldn’t even recognize the body.
EMANUEL: This was counterproductive. So, she says, they changed the design. The new bags…
SERAFINI: Have a transparent area in which the face of that loved one can be seen.”
– Gabriel Emanuel, “Doctors in DRC work to dissuade traditional funeral practices amid Ebola outbreak,” May 26, 2026
In addition to its emphasis on what constitutes a “safe burial,” the exchange demonstrates how closely trust in authorities is tied to the acts of recognition and witnessing, a dynamic that our colleague from Brazil, Andréia Vicente da Silva, has analyzed in her work on how COVID disrupted Pentecostal funerary rituals and our own project manager, Maria Jose Pelaez, has explored in a dispatch about Elsa Maldonado in Ecuador.
We identified three other important overlapping themes in the Western media’s coverage of the 2026 Ebola outbreak:
(1) What fills the information gaps: “A second battle is also underway to fight misinformation”
Following the attack on a hospital clinic during which families attempted to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones, Congolese local authorities and journalists reflected in the failure of communication on the part of public health officials. As Luc Mambele explained, “This lack of communication, this absence of communication from the health authorities in the province is what allowed rumors to take over and is what continues to this day.”
“Angry residents burn down tents treating Ebola patients in DRC as health protocols clash with burial traditions,” CNN.com, May 22, 2026.
(2) What occurs in the absence of aid
On US withdrawal from WHO, wholesale gutting of USAID, and cuts to the CDC, medical anthropologist at American University, Lauren Carruth explains:
“While officials from the WHO have downplayed the role of cuts to international organizations in hampering the response, local reports argue that the absence of USAID and U.S. funding has been highly consequential. According to this and other media reports, American officials did not learn of the confirmed outbreak until nine days after the WHO did, and almost a month after the first person died. The delay was compounded by samples being transported to the Kinshasa lab at the wrong temperature—a logistics task previously managed by USAID. USAID previously provided health worker training, contact tracing, testing, safe burial resources, and assistance with supply chains. In a recent New York Times article, Dr. Salim Abdool Karim from the Africa CDC asked, ‘Who else can bring 20 trucks in a matter of three days, have drivers, have fuel?’”
(3) Finally, on the importance of historical and anthropological knowledge
“We know that this is about so much more than that. It’s about history and culture and politics and even just about how people love and care for others in their family who are sick.” –Megan Schmidt-Sane, Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies
In her July 20, 2026 New York Times Magazine report, “Why Epidemics Breed Rage at Health Workers,” Sheri Fink documents the role of scholars, namely historians and anthropologists, in informing policy responses to public health crises such as COVID-19 and this most recent Ebola outbreak. Among other parallels she examines, Fink notes the commonality of how uncertainty—even in the face of more exacting science—“breeds” distrust. She reminds us of COVID times:
But unrest during epidemics is not about Ebola, Africa or education. It is something societies have struggled with for centuries, and it is evident in rich countries as well as poor ones, in modern times and medieval ones. During the Covid pandemic, Western doctors, nurses and health officials received not only applause and gratitude but also death threats. Patients denied that Covid existed as they died of the disease. Protesters carrying guns occupied sidewalks outside hospitals. Multitudes embraced treatments, such as ivermectin, that study after study showed to be ineffective. Vaccinators in Italy were assaulted. A German gas station attendant and a Michigan Family Dollar security guard were killed after asking customers to wear masks.
Mistrust does arise out of thin air. It has historical context. Fink explains, for example:
“Ebola looms less large as a threat to people whose lives are at risk every day from hunger, destitution and common infectious diseases. Ebola is just the latest shock after decades of conflict and suffering, state neglect, colonial and post-colonial violence, and the failure of international peacekeepers to stop civilian massacres.”
And, echoing theme #2 above (absent aid), Fink concludes her essay with a nod to current conditions:
“The country’s population also faced a precipitous drop in foreign assistance last year, when the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, an effort championed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.”