Michael Peel

Suddenly, infectious diseases and the devastation they can wreak and the reminders of the COVID-19 pandemic that they provoke are in everyone's minds again.

I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

Well, it's an outbreak that is already in two countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, and has killed at least 139 people, reportedly with more than 500 people infected.

The crisis has already led the World Health Organization to declare this a public health emergency of international concern.

And one of the problems is that the Bandibajo species of the virus does not have a vaccine.

And so efforts are now underway to urgently hunt for a jab against this lethal virus, which has fatality rates of up to 50%.

This is a very, very tough environment for global health efforts.

A number of rich countries have cut back significantly on international health aid.

The United States and Argentina have withdrawn from the World Health Organization.

And all of these things obviously have a negative impact on efforts to surveil for lethal outbreaks, as we're already seeing with Ebola and indeed the Hantavirus aboard the cruise ship, which has been in the news over the last month or so, but also for diseases which have the potential to drive a new pandemic, which of course, in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic,

is the thing that really scares people in the health world.

Health experts say that these, thankfully, are not viruses that threaten to cause a pandemic.

And the main reason is that they're much less transmissible than COVID-19.

Whereas COVID-19 was a disease you could catch in the air, generally, with both the hantavirus and with Ebola, the contact has to be much closer.

And so that does at least mean it can be, to some extent, contained.

Well, I think suddenly infectious diseases and the devastation they can wreak and the reminders of the COVID-19 pandemic that they provoke are in everyone's minds again.

And I think we've now moved into a different stage of what one health expert described to me as a cycle of panic and neglect.

What she meant by that was that during and after COVID, there was the panic stage where everyone said, well, we must stop this happening again.

But then, of course, as the intensity of the event recedes and other politics and other financial priorities intrude, the funding gets withdrawn.

People don't pay as much attention to these prevention measures until there's then another disease outbreak, or in this case, two in the last few weeks that have made headlines around the world.