EBOLA

In late 2013 the Ebola virus made the leap from bats to humans in a remote village in eastern Guinea, sparking a chain of infection that spread across several West African countries and eventually as far as the United States. The virus killed over 11,000 people, wiping out whole families, crushing people's livelihoods and undoing a decade of painstaking developmental gains. Then in 2018, the virus struck again, this time in the war-torn eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where efforts to combat the disease were hampered by chronic instability. Ultimately, the outbreak was brought under control with the help of a newly developed vaccine. The two outbreaks remain by far the most destructive since the discovery of Ebola.