Fast delivery of preventative medication could offer a lifeline to healthcare workers combatting Ebola
- 4 min. read ▪ Published
The recent outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) of Bundibugyo, a rare strain of the infectious disease Ebola, left 6,186 people infected and 3,007 dead as of the end of August, according to the European CDC.
Ebola—which spreads through direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids—is a particular hazard for healthcare workers; more than 160 of them have been infected, with at least 43 killed since this strain was first reported. There are currently no vaccines or approved treatments for the virus, although emergency clinical trials are taking place.
Scientists are currently developing antiviral medications—treatments that could be given as post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), meaning they can be effective at preventing illness if they are taken after exposure to Ebola, but before an infection has taken root. If and when the candidate antiviral PEP medications are approved, how can they best be deployed to healthcare workers for maximum survival?
In a study published online in The Lancet Infectious Diseases on August 25, 2026, researchers at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the school’s Pandemic & Epidemic Threat Analysis Lab (PETAL) show that healthcare worker–targeted antiviral PEP could avert workers’ deaths and preserve medical response capacity if antiviral drug courses can be both delivered rapidly after exposure and prioritized efficiently when supply or access is limited.
According to the study, led by Jacob N. Stapley and Youngsuk Ko—both postdoctoral scholars at PETAL—targeted antiviral PEP could avert over half of all healthcare worker deaths during Ebola virus outbreaks. However, achieving that impact is contingent on availability and pandemic preparedness; the researchers found that in lower readiness scenarios, where access was delayed and fewer healthcare workers receive the treatment due to disruptions in availability, the mortality reduction benefit falls to less than 20% of the maximum impact that could be achieved.
The study is the first of a planned series that is generating evidence on how to support effective use of medical countermeasures during Ebola outbreaks, including the current one. The Berkeley researchers are working in close collaboration with teams from DRC and Uganda, who are actively responding to the outbreak.
“We know we potentially have a tool that can help combat Ebola, so we asked ourselves how can we best deploy this tool,” Stapley said. “Of course a drug might work biologically, and that’s all well and good. But it is equally essential to get it to the right people in the right places at the right time.”
Ko said the next step will be to expand the modelling study beyond healthcare workers to try to bring the epidemic under control.
“We’d like to add more complex population structures such as community households, and funerals,” he said. “What if we give the drug to those who have sick patients in their households? If we can give the drug to the general population, such as household members, we’ll see if we can stop the outbreak or not.”
To build their model, the researchers adapted a published mathematical framework that follows an outbreak one infection at a time, tracking chains of transmission through communities, healthcare facilities, and funerals. They tuned it to reproduce two past outbreaks, one in West Africa and another in eastern DRC, and quantified the impact of an antiviral against this backdrop. This allowed them to estimate how many healthcare-worker deaths could be prevented.
“Rather than assuming that biological efficacy will translate directly into outbreak impact, we quantify how much benefit could be gained or lost with differences in readiness, delivery timeliness, operational disruption, and allocation strategy,” the authors wrote.
Charles Whittaker, assistant professor of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley Public Health and director of PETAL, stressed the importance of ensuring that therapeutic innovations, especially around antivirals, are made available to healthcare workers.
“Protecting the healthcare workers enables them to continue to render care and provide to other patients as well,” Whittaker said; “and our work underscores the crucial importance of not just having these therapeutic tools, but also that access is widespread and timely. Only then will we be able to realise the full impact of these incredible therapeutic innovations.”
