Local, not global. Citing the Ituri Collective, the author says Ebola has caused mostly small DRC outbreaks for 50 years; 2014 West Africa killed ~11,000. This wave: ~1,000 suspected, 100 confirmed in a province of ~7 million. Close-contact spread, he argues, is why it will not take hold in the West.

Why Ituri now. War, camps, pay-for-care clinics, malnutrition, HIV over 5%, and distrust of high-paid outsiders and past trials—not a new supervirus. He calls U.S. visa stops in Kinshasa (~1,800 miles away), Uganda, and South Sudan an over-reaction.

Clinics over consultants. Hire locals, leave lasting care, be honest about money; he says earlier outbreaks were already falling before vaccines could dominate, and that poverty plus cheap extraction keep the risk high. That last claim is the author’s brief, not a WHO line.

The narrative of polycrisis foisted on an ever-more sceptical public has wrecked the integrity of international public health. Under its current model, global health priorities are largely determined by a few very wealthy individuals with limited public health understanding, or corporations with direct vested interests in certain outcomes. Public health journals are financially beholden to these, as are mainstream media, and can only reflect the hype.

The story is all about the necessity for more money to enable experts to rescue both ourselves and the people of affected regions. Highly paid consultants and pharmaceuticals from Western corporations become essential to save populations apparently helpless without our urgent largesse. This is historically ridiculous, it is ignorant, it is stupid and the note by Villa and co-authors of the Ituri Collective explains why in very clear and coherent terms.

Ebola virus was first identified 50 years ago in DRC, and since then has caused intermittent outbreaks, mostly small. It has presumably done this throughout human history, which means hundreds of thousands of years in this area. The largest, in 2014, was in West Africa and killed about 11,000 people over a year. Spread by close and direct contact with body fluids from a sick person, it kills about 30% of presenting cases with a severe febrile illness and systemic bleeding (‘haemorrhagic fever’). Illness is therefore relatively obvious, as commonly is the path of transmission.

Ebola virus presence has been detected at low frequency in many animal species in Central and West Africa. Its main animal host, if it has one, is not clear, but evidence is found in bats, rodents, non-human primates, pigs and species such as the small duiker antelope. And, of course, occasionally in humans. Transmission from animals to humans is called a ‘spillover’ of a pathogen or disease, and it happens a lot. Influenza is a common........

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