When Emmanuel de Merode looks around, it's a picture of serenity.
"Most evenings there are elephants crossing the river and pods of hippos," says de Merode, director of the Virunga National Park, which encompasses about 2 million acres in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Mitumba Mountains, home to lowland gorillas, rise up before him. Behind him are the Rwenzori Mountains with glaciers and snow-capped tops beside the equator.
"It is one of the most beautiful places in the world," he says.
But beyond this picturesque scene, there is a volatile combination of brutal rebel violence and a burgeoning Ebola outbreak. De Merode and his team of over 800 park rangers are on the front lines as they try to combat both of those threats with severely limited resources.
In a region that's seen decades of bloody wars and a 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak, de Merode says the past few weeks stand out. "The situation we're living through now is certainly the worst we've experienced in the past 30 years," he says.
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He points to the lack of a vaccine for the strain of Ebola currently circulating, the dramatic drop in international aid and the "extremely violent armed conflict" that surrounds them.
Still, his team isn't stopping. They are busy building Ebola screening posts in the park to help the country contain the outbreak — and some rangers are also protecting the mountain gorillas from Ebola since the virus is particularly deadly to them.
On June 3, NPR spoke with de Merode — who has been in eastern DRC with the National Park Service since 1993 — to understand the situation and his team's critical role in combating Ebola. Here are highlights of the conversation, edited for clarity and length.
Virunga National Park is more than 180 miles from north to south. It stretches along a critical section of the border between Uganda and DRC, right in the Ebola-affected area. You are building screening posts to check travelers for symptoms of the virus. Explain the logic.
The national park serves as a natural firewall, of sorts. It's the only area where you can almost guarantee 100% screening. If you build the posts where roads cross rivers, it's almost impossible to pass without being screened. Anywhere else [where people cross borders] is very permeable — the populations can move around the screening sites.
Screening means that if you do get a case spreading eastward into the rest of the province — or indeed into East Africa: Uganda, Rwanda, or Kenya — you can trace everybody that they've traveled with and that enables you to contain an outbreak much faster.
In addition to Virunga National Park, Okapi Wildlife Reserve blocks the west and the north from the spread of the disease toward the big city of Kisangani, and downstream of the Congo River all the way to [the capital of] Kinshasa. So using these as natural barriers obviously has an enormous significance — enormous importance.
The park is footing the bill to construct five screening posts on all roads leaving the Ebola-affected area. Some will be done by the end of next week, others later this month. Each costs $44,000. What do these sites do and why this price tag?
These are quite, quite complex constructions. They're not just barriers on the road. There are at least six buildings that go with it. You have to channel sometimes large crowds through controlled passageways to avoid people contracting the disease from other travelers. [In 2018, there were two posts that screened between 3,000 and 4,000 travelers per day.]
We have to build a diagnosis room. They all need reliable internet connections. There's an analysis room, and the staff need computer equipment, and then there needs to be a very robust, rigorously built isolation center next to the control point, for suspected cases.
And then we have to accommodate and protect 30 staff per post. Two thirds of that staff being security against militia attacks. There will also be eight paramedics at each post, who are being recruited at the moment. We don't know how long the Ebola epidemic is going to go on, and we have to maintain these posts as long as they're needed.
The DRC has been particularly hard hit by the massive drop in foreign aid in the past year and a half. U.S. aid in 2024 amounted to $1.4 billion, and 2025 figures are just over $400 million. What's the impact on the Ebola response in the park and the region?
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Our level of preparedness is catastrophic, in part because there's been very, very little international response.
The health services in Congo are critically under-resourced in terms of handling this epidemic. One of the outcomes is that many, many, many health workers have already contracted the disease and died. This [lack of international support] really is what makes this particular epidemic so much more concerning than anything we've experienced before with respect to Ebola outbreaks.
So, for example, we're a part of the Ebola Response Committee and in North Kivu Province which has 11 million people — they had two body bags. That's dangerous because the bodies of people who've died of Ebola can spread the virus, [if they are not handled properly]. The cost of body bags is not that great, but it's just getting them here very, very quickly. So, we were able to purchase 100 body bags within 48 hours and get them to the health services, and then another 1,000 are arriving tomorrow.
Likewise with special [infrared] thermometers that avoid physical contact [because the virus spreads through contact with fluids]. There just aren't any in the province, so we can't diagnose cases very easily. And then for movements, the health services have practically no vehicles. Five of the park's vehicles have been assigned to the health services so they can do their work.
The last Ebola epidemic lasted 18 months, and all the signs are that it'll be significantly worse this time. The reality is that this could become an international problem — not just a Congolese problem —- if the international response doesn't materialize. It's very worrying.
Violence is, unfortunately, not new in eastern DRC. But there's been a spike in attacks in the park related to the armed conflict that's beset the region for more than 30 years. What's happening?
The rangers are working under conditions of extreme violence.
Two of our staff were killed 10 days ago in a militia attack in the center of the park. And then we had another five injured – three of whom were critically injured; one of them lost his eye — last Thursday. This morning, we suffered another attack in which two people were killed amongst our staff. So it's been an upsurge in violence over the last couple of weeks, which is really unprecedented for us.
I can't say for certain whether it's because of the outbreak of Ebola, but the two are certainly associated. And it really worsens the challenge of trying to manage the broader Ebola situation.
Virunga National Park is famous for its gorillas. In 1985 there were only 350 mountain gorillas left in the world. Today, it's estimated that there are over 1,200 between Uganda, Rwanda and DRC, with about a third of that population in Virunga National Park. But gorillas are thought to be very susceptible to Ebola -– by some estimates 98% of gorillas who get Ebola die from the virus and it's already reduced the global gorilla population by approximately one-third. How are they being protected from the ongoing Ebola outbreak in humans?
Our primary concern is for the human population but we've taken very strong measures to protect the mountain gorillas. We know that they're vulnerable. There was the case in Central Africa and Western Africa — in Gabon and the Republic of Congo — where it's believed tens of thousands of western lowland gorillas were killed by an Ebola epidemic in the early 2000s. So that threat is very real, and it's something we are managing.
We have about 200 rangers in the south of the park around the mountain gorilla population. We've closed down tourism — both because of the situation of armed conflict and because of the Ebola epidemic — and so we don't expect there to be very much contact at all with the mountain gorillas, which will help protect them. And the job of those rangers is to ensure that there isn't any contact at all because there is some level of poaching.
Plus, at the moment, that area [where the gorillas live] doesn't represent a major threat, there's been just one Ebola case in Goma, which is about 20 kilometers away.
We were very effective at managing the situation [regarding gorillas] in the 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak. And we're reasonably confident that we can do it this time.
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