In the span of a few weeks, two outbreaks have pulled global health back into the headlines. Ebola is once again spreading in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a hantavirus outbreak (unusual in both setting and scale) erupted aboard a cruise ship docked in the Netherlands.

Dr. Neil Vora, a former CDC epidemiologist who now leads the Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition, discusses current and former outbreaks in a recent TIME essay. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, including deployments to Liberia during the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak and to the DRC five years later, Vora reframes these outbreaks not as isolated emergencies but as predictable consequences of human interactions with the natural world.

The Common Thread: Spillover

Both Ebola and hantavirus are zoonotic, meaning they originated in animals before jumping to humans. In epidemiology, this is called "spillover," a term that can sound almost accidental. It isn't. The vast majority of emerging infectious diseases, and arguably every pandemic since 1918, began this way. Thousands of viruses are currently circulating in wildlife, any of which could, under the right conditions, make the leap.

And the "right conditions" are increasingly common.

Vora points to four interlocking drivers:

Habitat destruction. When forests fall, the boundary between wildlife and people erodes. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea is believed to have started when a toddler came into contact with bats living in a hollowed-out tree near a recently cleared forest.
Industrial animal agriculture. Cramped, monoculture farms function as biological amplifiers. A single sick animal can seed mutations that ripple through an entire facility before anyone notices.
The commercial wildlife trade. Live animal markets and the exotic pet trade have repeatedly moved dangerous pathogens (SARS, mpox, and likely SARS-CoV-2 among them) into densely populated cities.
Climate change. Roughly half of known infectious diseases have already been aggravated, at some point, by climate-related hazards. Shifting temperatures and weather patterns are redrawing the maps of where diseases can survive and spread.

Taken together, these forces have produced what researchers estimate is a roughly 1-in-5 chance of another pandemic in the next decade that kills at least 25 million people. That isn't a worst-case scenario. It's the base rate, given the trajectory we're on.

A Blind Spot in Public Health

Despite the evidence, prevention at the source remains strikingly under-addressed. Vora notes that the WHO's 86-page post-COVID report, meant to chart a course toward making COVID-19 "the last pandemic", mentioned "wildlife" only twice, and "deforestation" and "climate" once each, all in a single paragraph.

Medical schools, for their part, largely skip ecology, agricultural policy, and veterinary science, leaving most future physicians without a framework for understanding where these diseases actually come from.

There has been one serious attempt to change that: the WHO's pandemic treaty, adopted last year, is the first international agreement with real obligations around spillover prevention. But progress has stalled. Just a day before the WHO learned of the hantavirus outbreak, negotiators failed to reach an agreement on how to equitably share pathogen samples, vaccines, and treatments between wealthier and lower-income countries during future outbreaks. If we can't agree on how to share life-saving tools after a crisis hits, robust investment in preventing the next one becomes even harder to imagine.

What Actually Works

Vora is careful to note that no policy will stop every spillover. But a handful of well-understood interventions could meaningfully shift the odds:

Halt deforestation. The world lost 4.3 million hectares of tropical forest last year, an area larger than Switzerland. Protecting forests isn't only a pandemic-prevention measure; it simultaneously addresses climate change and biodiversity loss. The challenge is making a standing tree worth more than a felled one.
Strengthen safeguards on animal farms. Factory farming isn't going away in the near term, but investments in animal health, surveillance, and biosecurity need to keep pace with the scale of the industry.
Regulate the commercial wildlife trade. Live wild mammals and birds shouldn't be sold openly in dense urban centers, whether in Wuhan, New York, or Paris. The pattern (SARS in 2003, mpox the same year, COVID-19 two decades later) is too consistent to ignore.

A Shift in Mindset

Underneath the policy recommendations is a quieter, harder argument: science and regulation alone won't save us. Vora closes with a call for humility, a recognition that humans aren't above the natural world but embedded in it. As ecosystems fray, the consequences for human health are complex, unpredictable, and increasingly costly.

https://time.com/article/2026/05/22/the-ebola-and-hantavirus-outbreaks-offer-an-ominous-warning/

https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/about/index.html

https://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/about/index.html

https://theindependentpanel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/COVID-19-Make-it-the-Last-Pandemic_final.pdf