China deploys CDC experts to Uganda for international Ebola response coordination

Two Chinese disease control experts boarded a flight from Beijing just after midnight on Wednesday, heading toward Uganda to join an international effort to contain an Ebola outbreak that has already claimed hundreds of lives across central Africa. Their deployment marks a shift in how China positions itself in global health emergencies—a decade ago, it was still uncommon to see Chinese epidemiologists working alongside African partners on outbreak response. Now they are being invited to the table.

The platform they are joining became fully operational on June 29 at Makerere University in Kampala. It is a joint creation of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization's regional office, structured around fourteen technical pillars that span everything from surveillance and laboratory work to case management and community engagement. The two arrivals from China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention—An Zhijie and Wang Huanyu—bring experience from the Sierra Leone Ebola response a decade earlier, and they are being assigned to different critical functions within this coordinated system.

The outbreak they are being sent to address is substantial. As of the Saturday before their departure, the Democratic Republic of the Congo had documented 1,926 confirmed cases of Ebola, resulting in 702 deaths. The virus was first declared on May 15 and has since spread beyond its initial location, now affecting five regions across two additional areas. Uganda, meanwhile, had recorded 20 confirmed cases and one death by Monday of that week. China had already positioned two teams of medical specialists in the DRC itself—ten experts in total, with backgrounds in epidemiology, laboratory diagnostics, and clinical care.

An Zhijie will work within the coordination and governance pillar, a role that requires him to track how the disease is moving through different regions, assess the effectiveness of control measures already in place, and evaluate the risk of the virus crossing borders. He will also facilitate the sharing of information among the various organizations and countries involved in the response. In describing his assignment, An emphasized the importance of taking China's accumulated knowledge about disease control and adapting it to the specific conditions on the ground in affected countries. "It is important for us to integrate China's experience in disease control with the local context, share our hands-on lessons learned from previous outbreaks with international partners during routine technical discussions, and help Ebola-affected countries adopt suitable, tailored measures," he said.

Wang Huanyu, head of the Arbovirus Department at China's National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, is focused on laboratory capacity. The Africa CDC is working to expand the number of testing sites and increase how many samples can be processed, and Wang will support that expansion. But he has identified a specific bottleneck: samples are taking too long to travel from collection sites to laboratories, which delays diagnosis and admission of patients to treatment facilities. This lag time is contributing to the high death rate. Wang plans to analyze how each testing site is performing—measuring both the volume of work and the percentage of positive results—to help guide decisions about where supplies and resources should go.

An reflected on how different the landscape is now compared to a decade ago. "Now, we have been invited to join this platform to deal with public health emergencies in Africa, which is a testament to the trust placed in our capabilities," he said. The shift is subtle but real: from being absent to being sought out, from observing to participating in the coordination of a multinational response to a disease that moves fast and kills efficiently. The work ahead will test whether that trust translates into lives saved.