Claude used in Congo's Ebola response
Anthropic says WHO AFRO, CEPI and Congo's INRB are using Claude in the Bundibugyo Ebola response, where drafting a daily situation report has dropped from a full day to under an hour.
Anthropic has published a case study on how Claude is being used in the response to the Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The outbreak began in May. Of the nearly 8,000 confirmed cases, almost half have died, and there is no approved vaccine for this strain.
The work comes through a partnership convened by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). It includes the WHO Regional Office for Africa (WHO AFRO) and DRC's Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale (INRB), working with Anthropic's Beneficial Deployments and Applied AI teams.
At WHO AFRO, Tendai Muza and colleagues built a Claude skill for the daily situation report. It pulls case and lab figures from each health zone's PowerPoint deck, checks them against the previous day's report, flags changes in trend and summarizes the districts. Anthropic says a sitrep that used to take all day now takes under an hour. Paul Ouma of WHO AFRO said time limits used to mean the team could run only one disease model. They now run several at once to produce forecasts, for example to help decide where treatment centers should go.
CEPI used Claude to build a dashboard that tracks work on vaccine candidates. Polina Brangel, CEPI's R&D Data Innovation Lead, said decisions on which serological samples to analyze "remain a scientific judgement made by experts."
INRB, which has sequenced almost all BDBV genomes from the outbreak, is using Claude Science. Researchers can give it plain-language prompts to assemble viral genomes and build the virus's family tree.
The account is written by Anthropic, the vendor. It includes no independent evaluation of accuracy or of effects on the outbreak.