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After weeks of intense global coverage of the ​luxury cruise ship at the center of a deadly outbreak of the hantavirus, it turns out a far bigger and even deadlier simultaneous outbreak had been going undetected for more than a month in central Africa. On May 15, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced an epidemic of ebolavirus that by that time had already infected hundreds of people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spread across the border to Uganda’s capital and largest city, Kampala.

Both outbreaks are tragedies. Both should have been caught earlier. But the inequality at the heart of this story is stark: The death of three European passengers on an expensive Antarctic cruise was covered by wall-to-wall media. The British Army literally parachuted in a specialist team for one suspected case. Meanwhile in Mongbwalu, the Congo health zone at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak, at least six people were dying every day, invisible to global disease surveillance systems as the outbreak grew (and now remains) out of control.

After weeks of intense global coverage of the ​luxury cruise ship at the center of a deadly outbreak of the hantavirus, it turns out a far bigger and even deadlier simultaneous outbreak had been going undetected for more than a month in central Africa. On May 15, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced an epidemic of ebolavirus that by that time had already infected hundreds of people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spread across the border to Uganda’s capital and largest city, Kampala.

Both outbreaks are tragedies. Both should have been caught earlier. But the inequality at the heart of this story is stark: The death of three European passengers on an expensive Antarctic cruise was covered by wall-to-wall media. The British Army literally parachuted in a specialist team for one suspected case. Meanwhile in Mongbwalu, the Congo health zone at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak, at least six people were dying every day, invisible to global disease surveillance systems as the outbreak grew (and now remains) out of control.

The inequality this reveals is at the heart of a deep disorder in global governance that makes us all far more vulnerable to pandemics. There is a one in four chance of another pandemic as severe as COVID-19 within the decade, according to the Lancet Commission, a problem that is currently........

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