90-Second Read: Is Australia prepared for Ebola and Hantavirus?

The outbreaks of Ebola and Hantavirus highlight the challenges of waning global cooperation on health, and what Australia must do to prepare. The severity of their impact depends on how well these Ebola and Hantavirus outbreaks can be contained. The recent epidemic of the Andes strain of Hantavirus, which can spread from person to person, on board the Hondius highlights lessons from the Diamond Princess and Ruby Princess outbreaks of Covid-19. Australia's first case of the H5N1 bird flu was a child who had caught the infection overseas.

Though these were developed for Zaire Ebola in response to the 2014 West African epidemic, the largest and worst in history, with about 28,000 cases, there is no commercially available drug or vaccine for Bundibugyo Ebola. As a result, passengers condoled with the widow, who later also died of Hantavirus. There are lessons for the current Ebola epidemic from that of 2014, when a few hundred cases in March spiralled to almost 28,000 by July the following year. The virus has reached epidemic proportions, with 321 confirmed cases, and has spread to Uganda and possibly other countries further afield.

An outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola is proving difficult to control in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a region beset by conflict and insecurity. Australia is well prepared for the current threats, however, with a new Centre for Disease Control and quarantine facilities built for the pandemic. Major cities in Australia have specialised medical facilities for patient transport and treatment, which would be used to safely treat an Ebola case in Australia. A trending topic in 2026 was that the Pfizer Covid vaccine caused Hantavirus.

This broken record is played during every serious epidemic or pandemic, from SARS in 2003, to pandemic influenza in 2009, Ebola in 2014, Covid-19 in 2020 and now Ebola again. There are many examples of such failures, including the delay in diagnosing Ebola in the US and Nigeria during the 2014 epidemic, and one of MERS-coronavirus in South Korea in 2015, which led to 186 confirmed cases and 38 deaths. There are no travel restrictions around the Ebola epidemic as yet, but it is still far smaller than the one in 2014, when visas from the affected countries were temporarily cancelled.