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Comment by selectodude | Hacker News Reader

Rural Africa has had bad luck when it comes to white people coming in and telling them what to do.

Eating portions of their dead? I never heard that. I just heard that they weren’t able to do traditional funerals. Presumably that could be part of the traditional funeral, but I’ve got close friends and family I would have expected to hear that from. Do you have a reference?

I just finished Virus Hunters of the CDC, a 1996 book written by a couple of CDC epidemiologists, one of which had led a couple of Ebola responses in (what was then) Zaire and CAR. (He was even on the team that named the disease for a river near the town the outbreak was in.)

He certainly didn’t mention cannibalism. They were most concerned about the ritual washing before burial. Apparently the bodies are cleansed, bowels washed, etc. Given how Ebola spreads, this was virtually a guarantee that anyone handling the dead would contract the disease.

Their biggest successes were in teaching families how to use gloves, masks, and bleach. Any danger the CDC teams were in seemed to be mostly limited to political instability.

Another problem with the last outbreak is that one of the things Westerners were telling them to do was to stop eating portions of their dead. This is a tradition there, and local shamans started saying they were getting sick because they weren't honoring the tradition.

The last outbreak started from people eating infected bats. I'll have to read up on this one.

You are thinking of kuru.

That too, but bats are also frequently associated with ebola: https://www.google.com/search?q=ebola+bats

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