The broadcast opens with an aerial shot: a red-earth road threading through dense green forest, the camera slightly unstable, signaling distance and difficulty of access. A graphic flashes numbers that compress scale into immediacy: “1,000 suspected cases … several hundred dead … WHO declares emergency.”

Cut to ground level: a checkpoint outside a treatment centre. The image is dominated by luminous protective suits — white, yellow and bright lime PPE that contrasts sharply with the browns and greens of the landscape. Figures move deliberately, their gestures slowed by layers of plastic, goggles and gloves. The camera lingers on process: disinfectant sprayed on boots; vigorous hand washing; thermometers held just short of skin.

The frame tightens. A temporary treatment tent comes into view — canvas walls, improvised partitions, and metal cots. Inside, medical staff lean over patients, but always at a slight remove, bodies shielded by protective layers. The distance is visualized as much as enforced.

The soundscape of the newscast is layered with ambient noise. Generators hum, radio chatter crackles, boots crunch through gravel, and always the soft hiss of disinfectant sprays and muffled voices of responders speaking through masks. A steady voiceover delivers rising case numbers and urgent updates, all of it creating tension between the routine rhythms of containment and the escalating narrative of crisis.

Ebola has once again captured global attention, not only as a virus, but as a story. As Priscilla Wald reminds us, the newsreel’s power stems from what it shows and also how it orders meaning, a narrative that is both epidemiological and cinematic. It’s a story of numbers and bodies, but also of visibility, uncertainty and urgency.

For Ebola is a narrative event as well as a public health crisis. And how this outbreak story is told is consequential, for those of us far removed from the site of hazard, and, more urgently, for those closer to ground zero.

Ebola ravaged Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone for nearly two years starting in 2014. As I wrote at the time, fears of contagion moved faster and further than the pathogen itself, amplified through media that spread anxiety far beyond the transmission zones. More than a decade later, as Ebola re-emerges in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, this basic pattern persists. Although the virology has changed, the narrative that binds risk perception, state response and geopolitics has not. If anything, it has intensified.

The........

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