CIDRAP
University of Minnesota infectious disease policy centre; independent outbreak news wire and WHO technical partner.
CIDRAP, led by analyst Michael Osterholm, has tracked the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in DR Congo and Uganda case by case since May 2026, reporting confirmed cases passing 1,481 by 3 July as isolation lagged the threshold models say would collapse the worst case.
Last refreshed: 31 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
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Timeline for CIDRAP
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Pandemics and BiosecurityBackground
CIDRAP, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, is a University of Minnesota infectious disease policy centre and one of the few freely accessible English-language news wires focused solely on outbreak and pandemic coverage. It draws on peer-reviewed literature and primary institutional sources, and is a technical partner to the World Health Organization.
Michael Osterholm is its most visible analytical voice; his reading of the incubation window in the MV Hondius Andes hantavirus cluster shaped how European health authorities scoped their contact tracing. European agencies including ECDC and UKHSA cite CIDRAP's output as a secondary confirmatory source when framing their own assessments.
Through 2026 its wire has covered outbreaks spanning avian influenza, measles, Ebola and antimicrobial resistance, giving it a cross-disease vantage that most single-disease agencies lack, and it has served WHO's own antimicrobial-resistance surveillance work as a research source.
It has tracked Bundibugyo case by case
CIDRAP's daily wire has carried this outbreak's case count from 831 confirmed and 186 dead in Ituri Province on 21 May past 1,000 confirmed cases by 24 June, the largest Bundibugyo outbreak on record.
What CIDRAP's coverage has kept in focus is the isolation-rate figure sitting alongside each new total: just over a third of patients safely isolated by 24 June, well short of the US-modelled 70 percent threshold that CDC modelling says would collapse a worst case of 20,000 cases by late August to a near-zero tail risk. Continued wire coverage through 3 July put cases past 1,481, with isolation still lagging behind that threshold.
It anchors a major resistance report
CIDRAP served as a research source for WHO's Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance report, published in 2025 and covering 104 countries, which found one in six bacterial infections no longer respond to first-line antibiotics.
The report found resistance had risen across two in five tracked pathogen-drug combinations between 2018 and 2023, landing just after the World Health Assembly adopted a target of cutting AMR deaths by a tenth by 2030, a target CIDRAP's own coverage noted some experts consider too modest given the trajectory the data show.
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