Ebola Outbreaks: The Ecological and Economic Factors Driving Their Increase
For decades after the discovery of Ebola in 1976, outbreaks of the disease were relatively small and contained, affecting at most a few hundred people.
No more. In recent years, Ebola outbreaks have been much larger, affecting thousands and even tens of thousands of people in several countries. The 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak infected more than 28,000 people in 10 countries on three continents. The current eruption, which began in early May and shows no signs of slowing, has caused 363 confirmed cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has spread to Uganda.
Understanding the Surge in Ebola Outbreaks
The conventional explanation relates to the larger, more interconnected human populations that pathogens can access. But there is a more fundamental factor: the transformation of the ecology underlying Ebola, which is being remade, in part, by the growing global hunger for minerals to fuel the high-tech economy.
Most of the time, viruses like Ebola live quietly in the bodies of their animal hosts, widely known to be bats, causing them little or no harm. Virus-laden bats that live in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), whose borders encompass 60 percent of the world’s second-largest rainforest, typically reach only a few people in remote locations, leading to small outbreaks that quickly die out. Through repeated exposures, people living near Ebola-carrying bats gain some degree of immunity to the virus, with one survey suggesting that nearly 20% of Gabon’s forest dwellers have developed immune protection against the Ebola virus.
A fruit bat captured in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda, August 24, 2018. Photograph: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Impact of Deforestation and Human Activity
But cutting down the trees that bats live in disrupts this delicate balance between Ebola-carrying animals and humans. Bats don’t just disappear when their trees disappear. They sneak into remaining forest fragments near humans, increasing the likelihood of encounters in which humans are exposed to their virus-laden blood, saliva, and feces. This is why with every percentage point increase in deforestation in Central Africa, as a 2025 analysis found, the incidence of malaria and Ebola increases by 20 to 40 percent. This is why the 2014 Ebola outbreak was preceded by the loss of 85% of forest cover in southwestern Guinea, where the outbreak began. Bundibugyo’s current Ebola outbreak also fits this pattern, preceded by a record loss of 1.5 million acres of Congo Basin rainforest in 2024, according to satellite data analyzed by Global Forest Watch.
The Role of Artisanal Mining
Humanity’s pressure on the world’s forests is nothing new. We have been cutting down trees for fuel and growing food to feed us for millennia. But in the case of the DRC, there is also a new driver of deforestation that has more to do with the particular demands of the modern global economy than with human survival. One of the triggers for these losses, according to Malte Ladewig, an economist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, is the growing appeal of so-called “artisanal” mining: local populations extract minerals such as gold, coltan and cobalt to resell them in the global supply chain through an informal network of smugglers and middlemen.
Artisanal mining employs around 2 million people in the DRC, including more than 380,000 in eastern DRC. There are plenty of mineral-speckled rocks to navigate. Although the DRC is the world’s leading producer of cobalt and Africa’s largest copper producer, due to the country’s political instability and history of armed conflict, most of the DRC’s mineral wealth, valued at $24 trillion, remains unexploited by the commercial mining industry. At the same time, growing global demand for so-called “3TG” minerals (tungsten, tin, tantalum and gold), needed to make technology products ranging from semiconductors to smartphones, is expected to triple in the coming years. In a race to counter Chinese dominance of the sector, Donald Trump suspended rules against so-called “conflict minerals” in 2018 and last year signed a deal with the DRC for access to its mineral abundances in exchange for security.
The result for people living amid mineral-rich forests is a choice: between subsistence farming – which now faces more erratic rainfall due to climate change, declining soil fertility, the decimation of agricultural markets by conflict – and the hunt for minerals. When Ladewig surveyed local people in eastern DRC, he found that artisanal mining had become a “widespread subsistence activity,” involving more than 30 percent of local households.
Consequences and Future Considerations
But mineral hunting changes Ebola’s ecology in unique ways, boosting the pathogen’s ability to spread among us. When people expand their farms, they usually enter forests from the edge. Those looking for minerals, on the contrary, go deep into the heart of the forest. The rising price of minerals attracts people from all over the world, including those who do not benefit from the immunity acquired by ordinary forest dwellers. Far from populated areas and agricultural markets, they are more likely to support themselves through hunting, bringing human bodies and those of other animals into intimate contact. If their prey includes animals harboring Ebola viruses, such as Bundibugyo, the pathogens they catch can easily spread to others in makeshift mining towns with notoriously poor sanitation and limited health infrastructure.
It is unclear whether artisanal mining played a role in the sequence of events that sparked the current outbreak. But we do know that the first cluster of fatal cases appeared in Mongbwalu, in northeastern DRC, a booming mining town dotted with unregulated gold mining areas. It is also clear from satellite data that last year, as the price of gold doubled in response to the president’s tariffs, the forests around Mongbwalu were opened up, pushing a new frontier deeper into the jungle. Scientist Matthew Hansen tracks changes in global forest cover using satellite data from NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS). He zoomed in on Mongbwalu on his map of global forest change from 2000 to 2025 while sharing his screen with me on a video call. Wobbly lines of bright blue, indicating areas newly deforested in 2025, radiated from Mongbwalu to the west and south. “Wow,” he said, looking at it. The pattern was clear. “There’s a ton of mining going on around here. Holy shit.”
In the midst of deadly outbreaks, it’s understandable that experts and policymakers are focused on how we respond to outbreaks and how we can better prepare for the next one. But in the case of new pathogens such as Bundibugyo, which can evade standard diagnostic tests and vaccines, there is no level of preparedness or responsiveness that can crush them before they begin their exponential spread. It is only the relatively ignored third pillar of pandemic policymaking that can do this: preventing the broken ecologies that push new pathogens into human populations in the first place. This will involve greater attention to the health of ecosystems such as the Congo Basin forests, and how its minerals might be found inside the tingling smartphone in your pocket.
Sonia Shah is the author of five books, including Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, and writes the Cross Pollinations on Substack newsletter.
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