The Situation Report

S ince May, teams on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been combating a rare strain of Ebolavirus called Bundibugyo (BDBV). Every day, relais communautaires knock on doors of homes, offer counsel, learn of recoveries and deaths, and refer anyone with suspicious symptoms to get care.

In an outbreak like this one, a health worker's notebook is often the first and most complete record of when a person got sick, who they touch, and where they went before they knew they were infected. In the BDBV outbreak, almost half of the nearly 8,000 confirmed cases have died. How quickly someone is found—before their condition turns critical and while they can still be treated—often determines whether they survive.

Once a vaccine becomes available, that same contact information will tell responders exactly where it needs to go. A faster, more accurate picture of who was exposed means people can be found and protected before they ever fall ill. But the speed of this response is limited by how quickly the data can be passed along the chain from the notebooks of health workers, to the labs confirming diagnoses, and to the ministries and funders deciding where resources go next.

Global health partners are beginning to understand how AI tools can bring the greatest benefit during an outbreak. The Bundibugyo Ebola response still has a long way to go. Containing it will take time–although there are some promising signs of the outbreak slowing in Ituri. Response teams are helping the world learn what responsible, practical AI deployment can look like in real-world public health situations, where time is of the essence.

Health facilities send case information to their districts, often over WhatsApp, and send biological samples to local labs for sequencing. Each district puts case information onto PowerPoint slides and sends it on to the outbreak coordination center. At the provincial health ministry, the staff compiling the reports work late nights pulling together this information into slide decks. These decks turn into the published situation report, or sitrep.

The creation of sitreps, and the greater outbreak response, has recently started to look different in eastern DRC, thanks to a partnership convened by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations ( CEPI ) with, among others, the WHO Regional Office for Africa ( WHO AFRO ) and the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale ( INRB ). These organizations have been working with Anthropic's Beneficial Deployments and Applied AI teams to use Claude to analyze community health workers’ field data, to systematically monitor and review research evidence, and to use our scientific workbench.

“ I have fought this virus for fifty years. The tools have changed completely, but the rule has not: you beat Ebola by knowing where it is today, not where it was last week. ”