Ebola Is a Terrible Disease. I Saw It Firsthand.

Opinion|I Survived Ebola. This Is What Scares Me Most About This Outbreak.

As soon as I heard about the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I knew it was going to be catastrophic.

On Friday, the D.R.C. reported 246 suspected cases. Most Ebola outbreaks end before they get that big. The same day, reports emerged that someone had died of Ebola hundreds of miles away in Kampala, Uganda’s most populous city. Less than a week after it was first declared, this is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak in history.

I’ve seen Ebola up close. I got it while treating patients in West Africa in 2014. I know how destructive the disease can be — and how unprepared we are for its return.

After the 2014 outbreak, which killed over 11,000 people, the world strengthened systems to catch and contain Ebola outbreaks early. Much of that infrastructure — surveillance networks, rapid response teams and diplomatic partnerships — has been dismantled over the past year, as the United States abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.

Ebola is often called a disease of compassion because it finds its victims among the people who stay close when loved ones or their patients fall ill. This means parents taking care of their sick children, family members who wash the bodies of their dead relatives and health care providers who take care of patients at the most contagious stage of their illness. When I was working in Guinea, I admitted seven members of one family into our Ebola treatment unit. Even as the parents battled Ebola, they spent all day taking care of their children. In the end, only the parents survived.

If the outbreak were caused by the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, we’d now be able to provide a recently developed vaccine to family members of infected patients and to health care workers. But we have no effective treatments or vaccines for the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola driving the current outbreak.