The 2026 Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Central and East Africa has already left at least 49 people dead, with health authorities racing to stop the spread of the disease. What if they could have known ahead of time where it would begin? That’s the question behind a study published last year by Carson Telford and a group of researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). They wanted to know whether it would be possible to predict where Ebola outbreaks might start by looking at the characteristics of areas where the virus had already “spilled over” from an animal host into a human. Telford and his colleagues analyzed 24 outbreaks between 2001 and 2022, using variables like population density and forest cover to train their model. When they ran the analysis of where those outbreaks occurred, they found a high correlation with forest loss and fragmentation. The model they built with that data was strikingly accurate. It put a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo in its top 0.1% of risk areas — just a few months before an outbreak happened there in 2022. Another that followed in Uganda was in a district it had identified as being in the top 6% for that country. Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo spoke to Telford about the link between Ebola and deforestation, and how understanding it could help stop outbreaks early on. Medical staff carry an Ebola patient to a treatment center. Image by Moses Sawasawa via Associated Press. Mongabay: How would…This article was originally published on Mongabay