Good morning. Hampered by U.S. aid cuts and travel bans, the World Health Organization is sounding the alarm over the rapid spread of a rare Ebola strain – more on that below, along with Canada’s grounded Snowbirds and Iran’s internet blackout. But first:

• Carney plays down the Trump administration’s suspension of a joint Canada-U.S. defence board
• Conservatives demand more scrutiny of plasma sites after the deaths of two donors
• CSIS says transnational investigations are being hindered by Canada’s lack of lawful access powers

Right on the heels of hantavirus, another rare but deadly infectious disease is suddenly rattling the world. On Friday, Africa’s top public health body confirmed a new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Within just two days, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern.” Short of calling it a pandemic, that’s the WHO’s highest alarm for a health crisis. “I did not do this lightly,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said yesterday.

So far, there are 600 suspected cases of Ebola and at least 139 suspected deaths, a toll that will rise sharply as testing and contact-tracing ramp up. “We have significant uncertainty about the number of infections and how far the virus has spread,” Anne Ancia, the WHO’s representative in the DRC, told reporters yesterday. Uganda already confirmed two cases in Kampala, its biggest city.

This is the DRC’s 17th outbreak of Ebola since the viral fever was first discovered half a century ago. But most of those epidemics were caused by the disease’s Zaire variant, which can be targeted by drugs and a highly effective vaccine. The current outbreak is driven by the Bundibugyo strain – far less common, and harder to contain. There are no approved vaccines or treatments for Bundibugyo yet.

The delay

According to the DRC, the first person to die from this outbreak developed symptoms on April 24 in Ituri, a remote eastern province, and another person fell ill two days after that. Health workers sent samples to the capital, Kinshasa – more than 1,000 kilometres away, in a country with some of the world’s worst infrastructure – but those samples were tested for the Zaire strain and came back negative. By the time the lab confirmed the presence of Bundibugyo, it was May 15 and the virus had been spreading for weeks. At least 80 people had already died.

Unlike COVID-19 or measles, Ebola isn’t airborne; it’s passed on through direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is sick with the disease. But the fatality rate is high – ranging from 30 to 50 per cent – and affected patients are usually brought to treatment centres to limit the risk of transmission. That’s a challenge in Ituri, a gold-mining hub and the epicentre of the outbreak, where armed conflict between rebel insurgencies has escalated over the past two months. The region is “highly insecure,” the WHO’s Tedros said yesterday. “Over 100,000 people have been newly displaced, and in Ebola outbreaks, you know what displacement means.”

The response

On Monday, the Trump administration banned all non-Americans from entering the U.S. if they’ve been in the DRC, Uganda or South Sudan (which shares a border with those countries) over the past 21 days. Rwanda also slammed shut its normally busy border crossings with the DRC. Canada said yesterday that it had no immediate plans to impose travel restrictions – which studies show do little to contain the spread of infectious diseases anyway.

“More significantly, travel bans can damage the response to epidemics, because they make it difficult for doctors and scientists to reach the areas where help is needed,” The Globe’s Africa bureau chief, Geoffrey York, told me. “I spent time in West Africa during the world’s worst Ebola epidemic, in 2014 and 2015, and I remember the anger among health experts when airlines halted their flights into the region. The Trump administration’s latest travel ban may seem less harsh, but it still deters some of those who could otherwise help.”

Medical supplies and protective equipment are rapidly arriving in the eastern DRC, York told me, demonstrating the speed of the global health system when it kicks into gear. But it’s happening now with hardly any assistance from the United States, which officially withdrew from the WHO in January, after shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development last year. About US$1.4-billion in foreign aid to the DRC essentially dried up.

That has meant a “reduced budget for the most tedious and crucial elements of the response to Ebola: surveillance, screening and contact-tracing,” York said. “The lack of resources is already believed to have hampered the initial detection of the latest outbreak.” He pointed me to a social-media post from Atul Gawande, a former top official of the defunct USAID. Previous outbreaks in the DRC were caught in as little as 48 hours, helped by U.S. training programs – but “that’s now gone,” Gawande wrote. “This is the result.”

Health inspectors across Canada have cracked down on unlicensed food operations that sell dishes through Facebook Marketplace – but new programs are now helping these home cooks become small business owners. Read more about the tasty changes here.