When a New Virus Feels Like an Old Fear
You see "Ebola" in a headline, and your body reacts before your mind catches up.
Posted May 21, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
In 2014, I wrote in Fortune (see, Ebola: The dark side of globalization ) that globalization had become intellectually obvious but emotionally undigested. People knew viruses could cross borders but they still felt protected by distance.
During COVID , I spent several years writing about pandemic aftermath and health technology . One lesson stayed with me: Disease does not only move through bodies. It moves through institutions, devices, dashboards, memories, and trust. A health threat becomes psychological when people can no longer tell whether the system around them can help them cope.
The psychologist Richard Lazarus called this cognitive appraisal — the process by which we evaluate what a situation means and whether we can handle it. First comes the question, often wordless: Is this dangerous to me? Then comes the second: What can I do? If you have any energy left, you might also ask, Why did this happen?
On the latter, there can be many answers. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) government bears responsibility, but is widely classified as a failed state . A rapidly growing population, land grabs to capture abundant mineral resources by elites, persistent armed conflict over decades, mass internal displacement , disease outbreaks, and deep poverty have taken their toll. The March 23 Movement, a heavily armed rebel group backed by Rwanda and accused of widespread war crimes, controls swaths of its territory. Rwanda, on its end, views the M23 rebels as a crucial buffer to protect its territory from violence and discrimination by local militias. Their memory reference is the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi.
The Guardian 's U.S. health contributor, Melody Schreiber, penned a piece claiming that the United States is " simply choosing not to stop" the Ebola outbreak after massive USAID public health cuts to the fragile health systems in the DRC and Uganda. The European Union, another possible culprit, still invests heavily in African public health, but has fallen short of plugging the US health funding gap .
When a new outbreak arrives, we do not answer those questions from scratch. We answer them through the template of the last one. Mixed in with that are other memories of the past, as well as selective amnesia of things that prove too hard to remember. Collective memories are community-specific .
Research published in Nature (2023) found that people's memories of the COVID pandemic are shaped by their present identity and beliefs, not only by what happened. Vaccinated individuals misremembered their earlier risk perception as higher than it was; unvaccinated individuals who identified strongly with that choice misremembered it as lower. Both groups felt certain. Both were partly reconstructing the past from the standpoint of the present.
The danger is not that this reshapes how we remember COVID. The danger is that it reshapes how we appraise everything that comes after.
In mid-May, the World Health Organization (WHO) determined that the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda constituted a public health emergency of international concern. Early official reports listed hundreds of suspected cases and dozens of deaths, with numbers expected to change as surveillance improves. Unlike Ebola disease caused by Zaire ebolavirus, the WHO currently says Bundibugyo virus disease has no approved virus-specific vaccine or treatment , though early supportive care can improve survival.
The facts may be medically clear. They may not feel clear.
As of May 18, 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the risk of spread to the United States remains low . Ebola is not airborne; it spreads through direct contact with the body fluids of someone who is sick or has died, or with contaminated objects. That may be true. It may also feel irrelevant if you cannot tell whether institutions will tell you what is happening, or whether they themselves know.
The CDC itself acknowledged this in its May 18 statement: "We know people remember the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak." It is a rare public health sentence that names the psychological problem directly: People are not hearing this outbreak in a vacuum.
Here is what you can do.
Cognitive appraisal is not a thought that happens to you. It is a judgment you can notice and revise. When you encounter threat information, pause and ask three questions in order.
The virus spreads through direct contact. Fear spreads through memory. In fact, fear can spread and suppress disease transmission independently of the actual pathogen. Noticing the difference is where appraisal begins. But appraisal itself depends on something harder to notice: whether the institutions around you are telling you the truth, whether they know what's happening, and whether they're resourced to help. In places where those systems have collapsed — from decades of conflict, extractive economics, or political abandonment — even accurate threat perception cannot translate into effective action. The psychology is clear. The systems are not.
Epstein, J. M., Parker, J., Cummings, D., & Hammond, R. A. (2008). Coupled contagion dynamics of fear and disease: Mathematical and computational explorations. PLOS ONE , 3(12), e3955. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003955
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and Adaptation. Oxford University Press.
Undheim, T.A. (2020) Pandemic Aftermath . Atmosphere Press.
Undheim, T.A. (2022) Health Tech . Routledge.
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Trond Arne Undheim, Ph.D., is a former Stanford and MIT researcher in systemic risk and policy, host of the Futurized podcast, and author of The Platinum Workforce .
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.