The DRC has had eight run-ins with Ebola since 1976, and has proven to be remarkably successful at controlling the virus. In 2014, for example, while West Africa was struggling with its historically unprecedented epidemic, the DRC managed to contain its own separate outbreak after just 66 cases and 49 deaths. “In the West Africa outbreak, nobody was looking for Ebola. It wasn’t on a list of things that people were worried about, or even among the top suspects at the time,” says Rimoin. “But in the DRC, when you see something that resembles Ebola, it’s one of the first things that come to mind.”

The symptoms of Ebola are greatly exaggerated in the popular press. It’s not a disease of apocalyptic hemorrhaging from every orifice, and symptoms can easily be mistaken for other maladies. In this case, the first patient—a 45-year-old man who contracted the virus on 22 April—initially went to see a traditional healer. When that didn’t work, he took a taxi to a health center—and died on the way. (Both the driver, and a third individual who cared for the man, also eventually died.) The center quickly suspected Ebola and immediately sent samples to a national laboratory in Kinshasa. The staff there had the right knowledge, training, and connections—they ran some preliminary tests while also calling international colleagues. Rimoin flew over with the latest diagnostics.

After the first positive case was confirmed, the government immediately notified the WHO, which activated their emergency protocols. That inaccessibility of Likati was both a blessing and a curse—it made it harder for the virus to spread, but also harder for health workers to reach the infected zone. Fortunately, after the sluggish response to the West African Ebola epidemic, the WHO had set up a $41 million contingency fund to ensure that money would be readily available for future emergencies. This fund allowed them and other organizations to quickly rent helicopters for flying personnel, generators, and supplies into Likati. “Within 24 hours, we could start airlifting,” says Ibrahima-Soce Fall, director of the health security and emergencies cluster at the WHO’s African office.

The team set up a base camp and field lab in the grounds of a former convent. Health workers immediately started tracking anyone who had contact with infected individuals, eventually tracing 583 such contacts. There weren’t any good maps of the area, so the volunteers used their cellphones to start charting the region. They spread out through the region’s villages to improve accessibility by fixing bridges and forest tracks. With training from UNICEF and the WHO, they taught local communities how to stop Ebola from spreading, how to safely bury people who die from the disease, and how to disinfect affected homes.

In the end, the outbreak was so small that it’s unclear if this fast response made much of a difference. But with diseases like Ebola, it’s far better to be accused of overreacting than of being lax. “It’s a good sign of things to come,” says Rimoin. “It wasn’t necessarily needed in this case, but it showed that the world is much more capable of managing outbreaks.”