Spread too thin: Africa’s next Ebola outbreak
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2026
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The latest Ebola emergency is different from previous ones: there is no vaccine, and the kind of community-level work that stops the spread has been thinned by aid cuts. Britain is likely to get a new prime minister soon; we profile Andy Burnham, the Labour party’s polling favourite. And celebrity book clubs abound—but useful criticism in them does not.
Guests and host:
- John McDermott, chief Africa correspondent
- Joel Budd, social affairs editor
- Catherine Nixey, culture correspondent
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- Ebola outbreak, West Africa
- Andy Burnham, British politics
- celebrities, book clubs, book industry
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:10.1 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:13.2 | I'm Jason Palmer. |
| 0:19.0 | Today on the show, profiling the polling favorite for Britain's next prime minister |
| 0:23.3 | and the warm, cozy, useless world of celebrity book clubs. |
| 0:33.5 | But first... |
| 0:43.3 | ... But first... On Sunday, the World Health Organization made official what had been brewing in headlines for days. |
| 0:49.3 | I declared a public health emergency of the international concern over the Ebola outbreak in the |
| 0:56.3 | Democratic Republic of the Congo that has already spread to Uganda. |
| 1:01.9 | Ebola is, to put it mildly, a horrible pathogen, spread only by contact with bodily fluids |
| 1:07.7 | that causes a hemorrhagic fever that can have a huge fatality rate. |
| 1:12.6 | That WHO designation signals a more complicated outbreak that demands a more coordinated response. |
| 1:19.7 | Africa had been getting better at that kind of response. |
| 1:23.1 | But this time, things are different. |
| 1:25.5 | What we know so far is that this Ebola outbreak seems to be shaping up to be the worst since 2014-16, |
| 1:33.3 | when more than 10,000 people died in West Africa. |
| 1:37.3 | John McDermott is our chief Africa correspondent. |
| 1:44.6 | Initial data suggests that more than 100 people have died in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, |
| 1:51.9 | perhaps around 400 cases. |
| 1:53.9 | But these are almost certainly underestimates. |
| 1:57.0 | And it's safe to assume that the virus has probably been spreading for a few weeks in eastern DRC |
| 2:02.8 | and could well be in Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan, in addition to other parts of the region. |
... |
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