Why some Ghana and other African nations are turning down Trump aid money

I just cannot imagine that if you still had the full slate of health partners that the US government was funding in Congo up until [the cuts] shut most of that down, that no-one would have seen that an unidentified viral haemorrhagic fever was spreading," adds Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the USAID response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

DR Congo was one of the first countries to accept the new American health deals - and the US says the agreement is helping co-ordinate Kinshasa's response to the crisis.

Last month provided further evidence of this readiness to tie health financing to American priorities - with the announcement that the US would withdraw completely from funding HIV/Aids programmes in South Africa.