Folha de São Paulo / WHO, May 19, 2026

On May 5, health workers in Mongbwalu — a small town in the Ituri province of eastern Congo, near the Ugandan border — noticed something wrong. People were dying, including colleagues. The disease was unknown. They reported it.

On May 15, the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa confirmed the cause: the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus. On May 16, the WHO Director-General declared an international public health emergency. On May 19, the WHO Emergency Committee convened in Geneva.

Eleven days from a cluster of unexplained deaths in one of the most remote provinces on earth to a coordinated global response. No vaccine exists for this strain. No specific treatment. The only tool available at every step of that chain was the same: someone saw something, named it, and passed it on.

One hundred and thirty-one people have died. The epidemic is not over.

But something else happened inside this story that the headline didn’t say.

The 18th-century mystic known as the Baal Shem Tov — the founder of........

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