Extreme Commanders

Mystery illness in Congo kills more than 50 people, including children who ate a bat

An unknown illness has killed over 50 people in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to doctors in the central African nation and the World Health Organization.

The interval between the onset of symptoms and death has been just 48 hours in the majority of cases, and "that's what's really worrying," Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital, a regional monitoring center, told The Associated Press on Monday.

The latest disease outbreak in Congo began on Jan. 21, and 419 cases had been recorded as of Monday, including 53 deaths.

According to the WHO's Africa office, the first outbreak in the town of Boloko began after three children ate a bat and died within 48 hours following hemorrhagic fever symptoms.

There have long been concerns about diseases jumping from animals to humans in places where wild animals are popularly eaten. The number of such outbreaks in Africa has surged by more than 60% in the last decade, the WHO said in 2022.

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Bird flu responsible for deaths of 100s of sandhill cranes near LaPorte-St. Joseph line

More than 100 migrating sandhill cranes have been found dead on a frozen Fish Lake from avian influenza, which has resulted in millions of deaths of mostly chickens in Indiana and across the nation this year.

Eli Fleace, an Indiana Department of Natural Resources Avian Flu Health Specialist, said sandhill cranes migrating north have been hit especially hard this year by the current H5N1 strain of the virus.

“This is the first time that H5N1 has caused a mortality event in the cranes at this scale,” he said.

According to DNR, an estimated 1,500 sandhill cranes in Indiana have died so far this year from bird flu in LaPorte, Starke, Jasper, Newton, Green and Union counties.

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The Pandemic Turns 5. We Are Still Not Prepared for the Next One

It’s hard to believe it's been five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2020, the disease has killed more than 1.2 million Americans—more than in any other country. That accounts for more than 1 in 7 reported COVID-19 deaths in the whole world (although the true global death toll is likely much higher due to under-reporting). Don’t be fooled by some social-media revisionist historians who would have us believe that COVID-19 was “mild”—it was one of the most lethal infectious disease outbreaks in human history, ranking only behind the 1918 Spanish Flu and the Bubonic Plague (not including the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic).

Thankfully, in 2025, the days of lockdowns and quarantines now seem a distant memory for many—even though the physical, mental, and emotional impacts of the pandemic persist in many ways. However, the question remains: Are we better prepared for next time?

Sadly, if anything, we are less prepared than before.

Pandemics are not necessarily once-in-a-lifetime events. We already saw in 2009 a swine flu pandemic that killed up to half a million people globally. H5N1 bird flu continues to spread in poultry, wild birds, and mammals in the U.S., with each case increasing the risk of further spillover into humans—making the U.S. a possible epicenter of any new flu pandemic, should the virus evolve further to spread easily among humans. MPox, MERS (another coronavirus with a high fatality rate), and Ebola are just some of the currently circulating pathogens with pandemic potential. And, of course, "Disease X" (a potential virus that could emerge in the future that we don't yet know about) is always a possibility.

What should we be doing that we’re not? First, we should be making investments, not cuts, in pandemic preparedness. The U.S. has withdrawn funding from the World Health Organization. Working alongside local and national health authorities, the WHO is a key “first responder,” identifying and containing infectious-disease outbreaks before they spread. The U.S. contributed approximately $120 million in 2023-2024 on responding to acute health emergencies and to preventing pandemics and epidemics, so our step back leaves a massive hole in resources designed to tackle emergencies and stop outbreaks from spreading. Also, recent funding cuts or freezes to agencies like USAID are already having ramifications on the ground, with public-health professionals concerned that progress in tackling diseases like tuberculosis will stall or regress. With less funding, pandemic preparations also slow down, and the U.S. ceasing negotiations for the Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations makes matters worse.

Nationally, purported plans to de-prioritize infectious-disease research and defund some CDC training programs are a recipe for having a public-health workforce that is under-resourced and under-skilled to deal with future pandemic threats. Although some employees have since been rehired, sweeping and hasty cuts to key staff involved in potential pandemic response will mean a loss of invaluable experience of those working on the public-health frontlines during COVID-19.

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