At the front lines of the Ebola crisis in Central Africa, badly equipped health workers with little outside support are losing the fight against one of the worst outbreaks in history. Today, my colleague Declan Walsh takes us to the epicenter of the virus to understand why so far its spread has been nearly impossible to stop.

This outbreak was only detected just over two weeks ago, but the virus was probably spreading for two, some groups are saying even 3 months before it was detected. And so we just don't know how deep, how wide it has gotten into the population in these areas. And that's really hampered efforts not just to treat the people affected by the disease, but to contain its spread.

So far, about 250 people are confirmed to have died. There are about another 1,100 suspected cases. But the true spread and extent of this virus is thought to be much, much wider than that. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the virus is way ahead of the response at this point already. This is the third largest Ebola outbreak on record and there are groups saying that it has the potential to become the largest ever.

The road to get there was quite difficult. It was made of mud. It was extremely rough and bumpy, but all along that road, we passed these Congolese military checkpoints and that was because we were passing through territory where at least three or four different militias were known to operate.

When we got to Mongbalu itself, we went straight to the public hospital which we knew was the center of treatment efforts. We were expecting really to see the architecture of an Ebola response that you classically think of... large white tents, lots of people walking around in sealed suits. But there was almost nothing.

Apart from the doctor who brought me in, the ward was just full of people who had come to help the Ebola patients... usually relatives who had come to bring food or water because those things aren't provided by the hospital. But they were wearing almost no protective equipment. We found this young boy, 5-year-old boy called Emanuel... his son had been going to school just a few days earlier when the teacher sent him home... Emmanuel started to bleed uncontrollably out of his nose. Just a couple of yards away, two beds down, there was lying the body of a 21-year-old woman called Christine Bahati, who had died just hours earlier. The body of a person who has just died of Ebola is extremely contagious. And yet the remains of this poor woman were just covered by this thin sheet.

Ebola is this highly contagious hemorrhagic disease which is spread not like COVID-19 through respiratory means but it's spread through touch usually by touching bodily fluids... This particular strain of the disease is called Bundibugyo. But it is an incredibly rare strain of the virus. What that means is that as yet there is not a vaccine or a cure for this disease.

When Ebola spreads into a population, it often presents in people initially with symptoms that are very similar to malaria or typhoid. Many poor people, they tend to go to traditional healers or they'll go to some local small clinic. All of that combined means that people in Mongbalu were really only going to the hospital for medical help when they were approaching the last stages in the disease.

Initially, there wasn't even a test in this entire region for Bundibugyo. They sent samples off to the regional lab... and it came back negative for Ebola because they were testing for an entirely different strain, the much more common strain which is called Zaire. Often times they said by the time the test result came back the patient was already dead. It's this gold mining town that has a huge population of migrant laborers. It brings gold smugglers, it brings sex workers. And these are all people who move in and out of the town as well.

A huge obstacle to fighting this outbreak has been the fact that a lot of people in these communities are still in denial about the virus. They heard so many stories about how people saw this disease as some sort of conspiracy... association with the hospital as a place where people go not to have their lives saved, but to die.

The huge issue was how to deal with the body of this popular pastor who had just died the night before. His name was Sylvest Atama. Traditional burial practices in the Congo involve large numbers of mourners touching the body of a deceased person. And so a funeral can become a super spreader event. The day before they had stormed into the hospital compound and the director told me he had been chased through the compound with people throwing rocks at him.

Across the city Red Cross workers who were trying to carry out these what they call safe burials... run into the same kind of resistance. They've been threatened. They've been attacked. Because people effectively don't believe the virus exists or else they don't believe that it poses a threat to them.

Well, if you speak to people in the aid community, for them, there's no doubt that if USAID and American aid more generally were still in place that this virus would have been detected sooner than it was. The Trump administration is abandoning plans to create a $1.8 billion fund for people who said they were victims of unfair government prosecution, including January 6th rioters.

And President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday asking tech companies to give the government oversight of new AI models before releasing them. Under the order, tech companies would give the government 30 days to review their models before making them available to the public. This is the administration's biggest step toward regulating AI, and it marked a change in approach for Trump.