California Group Sends Quarter Million N95s to Stop Ebola While Saving Lives from Everything Else

When an outbreak hits, the world watches the virus. What kills more people—and hardly makes the news—is what happens to everything else.

Direct Relief, the Santa Barbara-based nonprofit now in its 69th year, just shipped over 250,000 N95 respirators to Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking the largest announced delivery of masks to date for the region’s Ebola crisis. But here’s what makes this shipment different: it arrived alongside antibiotics, insulin, cardiovascular medications, and water purification supplies. Because Dr. Jeffrey Samuel, Direct Relief’s clinical pharmacist and regional director for Africa, understands something critical—containing a virus and keeping a health system alive aren’t the same mission. They’re the same fight.

The math is brutal. During the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak, the disease itself claimed 11,325 lives. But the collapse of routine healthcare claimed more than 10,000 additional lives—people dying from malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis because clinics shut down, fear kept patients away, and systems buckled under strain. The virus was the headline. The collapse was the real catastrophe.

This is why Direct Relief isn’t just dropping PPE and walking away. They’re working with VillageReach, a global health nonprofit, to ensure 600 community health workers and facilitators can keep doing early detection, contact tracing, immunizations, and fighting misinformation—the unglamorous backbone of any real response. Since May alone, Direct Relief has pushed more than $10 million in medicine and supplies into DRC. Since 2023, they’ve invested $17.5 million specifically in diabetes care—insulin, needles, test strips, refrigerators for temperature-sensitive medications.

The organization itself carries the DNA of this kind of thinking. Founded in 1948 by William Zimdin, a wealthy Estonian businessman who fled Nazi Europe and settled in California, Direct Relief began by mailing relief parcels to postwar refugees rebuilding their lives. After Zimdin’s death, his friend Dezso Karczag—a Hungarian wartime refugee Zimdin had helped rescue—took over and expanded the mission globally. Nearly 80 years later, Direct Relief still earns perfect four-star ratings from Charity Navigator and a perfect fundraising efficiency score from Forbes. They operate in all 50 states and more than 90 countries, serving people affected by poverty or disaster without regard to politics, religion, or ability to pay.

The lesson here transcends Ebola. Real crisis response isn’t about choosing between stopping the threat and keeping life running. It’s about doing both at once—protecting the frontline workers, yes, but also making sure that while you’re fighting one disease, you’re not accidentally abandoning people to another.