Dr. Terry Simpson - The Unfiltered MD
May 24, 2026 · 9 min · 9 segments
This week on The Unfiltered MD: Ebola spreads through Central Africa as the U.S. ramps up airport screening, new studies link fatty liver and diabetes to heart disease and dementia, teens lose sleep…
And the reason this matters is because the outbreak has now moved beyond isolated rural areas and spread into broader regional problems involving urban movement, weak healthcare infrastructure, delayed testing, and cross-border travel.
Current estimates suggest well over one thousand suspected and/or monitored cases are tied to this outbreak.
Now, before start-- people start buying canned beans and posting next pandemic videos online, let me say something important.
Ebola is not spreading through the air the way influenza or SARS-CoV-2 spreads.
It still requires close contact with bodily fluids, caregiving exposure, contaminated healthcare settings, or burial practices.
That makes it vastly harder to spread globally, but that does not make it minor.
Once Ebola gets into cities with delayed diagnosis, overwhelmed hospitals, poor sanitation, and weak contact tracing, containment becomes dramatically harder.
Americans returning from affected regions, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and South Sudan, are now being routed through Washington Dulles Airport for enhanced screening.
The CDC is reporting sending additional personnel there for monitoring and screening operations.
When governments begin funneling travel through designated airports for infectious disease surveillance, that tells you this is no longer theoretical.
Now, that does not mean we're talking about reliving two thousand and twenty, but this outbreak also exposed us something uncomfortable.
Epidemiologists, lab workers, contact tracers, airport surveillance teams, and local healthcare systems are invisible when they work well.
And after years of cuts, political attacks, burnout, and fragmentation, many of those systems are weaker than they were during the two thousand and fourteen Ebola response.
And the reason this matters is because the outbreak has now moved beyond isolated rural areas and spread into broader regional problems involving urban movement, weak healthcare infrastructure, delayed testing, and cross-border travel.
Current estimates suggest well over one thousand suspected and/or monitored cases are tied to this outbreak.
Now, before start-- people start buying canned beans and posting next pandemic videos online, let me say something important.
Ebola is not spreading through the air the way influenza or SARS-CoV-2 spreads.
It still requires close contact with bodily fluids, caregiving exposure, contaminated healthcare settings, or burial practices.
That makes it vastly harder to spread globally, but that does not make it minor.
Once Ebola gets into cities with delayed diagnosis, overwhelmed hospitals, poor sanitation, and weak contact tracing, containment becomes dramatically harder.
Americans returning from affected regions, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and South Sudan, are now being routed through Washington Dulles Airport for enhanced screening.
The CDC is reporting sending additional personnel there for monitoring and screening operations.
When governments begin funneling travel through designated airports for infectious disease surveillance, that tells you this is no longer theoretical.
Now, that does not mean we're talking about reliving two thousand and twenty, but this outbreak also exposed us something uncomfortable.
Epidemiologists, lab workers, contact tracers, airport surveillance teams, and local healthcare systems are invisible when they work well.
And after years of cuts, political attacks, burnout, and fragmentation, many of those systems are weaker than they were during the two thousand and fourteen Ebola response.
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