Ebola cases pass 2k as crisis escalates
nature.com
nature.com
Not only are they potentially exposed to the deadly disease, they have to content with violent attacks from the population they're trying to help.
It sounds incredibly complex - a mix of political mistrust, lack of education and difficult terrain making containment difficult.
While spreading to populous areas would be a major concern, I imagine that nations blessed with more resources may be in a better position to quarantine, contain and prevent the spread of Ebola.
Imagine having to wear all that protective gear in 80% humidity, limiting your visibility and hearing, limiting your bathroom habits and ability to rehydrate and eat, for hours at a time, in potentially hostile social situations, while dealing with a person or a corpse that you have a very good suspicion could infect and kill you with literal Ebola, a disease that will liquify you from the inside, every day, for months at a time, with no end in sight, and the virus seemingly 'winning.'
Absolute heroes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remdesivir
But of course there's no guarantee, it's not really a great question when it comes to biology.
https://www.gilead.com/purpose/advancing-global-health/ebola
The latest report (4 June 2019): https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/325126/SITR...
Figure 1 on Page 3 is a good-ish overall representation of the situation. Ebola is sustaining itself. It hasn't gone geometric yet, but it could at nearly any time, if not already.
One important thing to note is that though it may seem that in the last 3 weeks the epidemic has been tapering off, that is an artifact of the reporting situation there. There is a significant lag in identification of deaths and causes. Feel free to look back over the other reports to see this reporting lag effects.
Another thing to note is that North-Kivu province is about the same size as West Virginia with about 2.5X the population. Goma, the capital there, has a population of about that of San Jose proper.
Combined with other sources that other HNers have linked, the Nature article is correct to sound the alarm here. The Ebola fighters are trying their best (despite the complicated social situations, weather, gear, humidity, and resource limitations), but Ebola is not quitting either. This situation is not something to wave away and is very deserving of international attention.
It was turned into a 6-episode miniseries on National Geographic (just aired last week), but the book is 100% worth the read if you're interested in the topic.
actual rate => graph
const rate => linear graph
linear rate => quadratic graph
quadratic rate => cubic graph
...AIDS does not evolve variants. HIV, which is a virus, can evolve.
There is neither a vaccine nor a cure for HIV.
But the jury is still out on what evolutionary processes are ongoing. Is the virus adapting to its new host and consequently evolving more slowly, or is it quickly developing increased transmissibility? It's not quite clear.
Problem with Ebola is that its transmission among humans is via the same thing that kills humans.
I seem to remember a study from ages ago where they compared strains of HIV from South Africa and Japan. Condom usage in South Africa is low, so the virus evolved to develop a high viral load quickly. In Japan the opposite was true, condom usage was high, the strains that caused the victim to die early became extinct.
I don't have an answer for what should be done, but I can tell you that your suggestion is not it.
I suspect mass use of force would work (let's just assume we had unlimited troops or something crazy).... but only for a while.
For a health situation like this you need buy in from the locals to change how they handle things longer term or it might pop up again.
To provide some context, just the eastern provinces of the DRC, where most of the violence is concentrated, have a population of more than 20 million people and a land area larger than Germany. The UN mission in the DRC, MONUSCO, has just 15 000 troops. A figure which shrinks annually as a result of US-forced budget cuts.
Those budget cuts (which the Trump administration has loudly boasted about, FWIW) have also severely depleted the aviation budget, preventing MONUSCO from being able to deploy as many attack helicopters as its commanders say it needs to go after armed groups and reducing its ability to transport troops by air. This forces them to take long, slow journeys on the country's dilapidated road network, even in cases of urgent responses. During the rainy season it can take hours to travel a few kilometres despite having specialised vehicles.
Add to that the fact that government troops are often corrupt and local commanders can be in league with some of the rebel groups, and it's a pretty difficult mission at the best of times.
Perhaps it's because Ebola is deadly and it's easy to remain ignorant of the humanitarian crisis plaguing many of those 76,000 monthly refugee/asylum seekers... both before and after crossing. Perhaps it's because we all fear catching Ebola from an airport or shopping mall, but none of us fear catching "run-for-your-life-itus", or have to wonder how we'll feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves in a brand new country where we don't speak the dominant language or understand the culture, but we know it's safer than where we came from?
Or perhaps it's simply because it's not a political punching bag issue? ... that's probably the real truth neither "side" wants to admit.
Ebola isn't going to run rampant through the US - we have a great medical system that wouldn't be trying to treat patients in a field in the middle of a war zone. We should lend all the support we can to DRC to help prevent the spread of this terrible virus - not out of fear of it spreading to our home nation, but out of compassion to the people of the DRC.
At the same time, we should really step back from our trenches and objectively examine our own domestic problems - not through the lenses of political ideology, but through the lens of a decent human being.
(ya, this is a throwaway... advocating we stop being political about our own domestic crisis is sure to attract a lot of negativity, unfortunately).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/border-crossing-increa...
This insular, isolationist attitude is precisely what is currently eroding the United States' soft power in the world today.
We have huge groups of actively ignorant people supporting the growth of climate change, anti-vaccination, and a host of other dangerous actions.
Now those fighting Ebola outbreaks are getting attacked.
I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like rationality is fast disappearing from this world. It’s only a matter of time before we destroy ourselves.
I realize this type of gloom and doom stuff has always been predicted throughout history, it just seems “this time is different” for real with the intersection of technology and ignorance reaching levels we’ve never seen.
However, measles outbreaks and hate-crimes aren't going to stop because one does not pay attention to the news.
It seems more would be done if local news, or even just having a conversation with a friend were the primary way of obtaining information.
I would venture a guess that you're more likely to pursue a cause if it directly affects your community or someone you know and love thinks it's important, than you are just by reading something on the internet.
You'd like history, the masses of humans have always been like this.
This is more to do with being unlucky where the outbreak occurred in a country without order in that part, than fake news affecting anything.
A powerful entity conducting a controlled bio-attack to clear opposition to future mining operations is entirely plausable.
They may face other issues and we just aren’t aware of it.
Rationality is energy intensive and difficult to cultivate and is usually a socially learned or reinforced skill (similar to the fact that long-term research is usually only funded by public tax dollars and not corporations).
So I don't think now is any different, it's just at a different scale and behooves those of us who have had the privilege to cultivate the skill to not gloom and doom and to instead show the way up the ladder (if possible, not all people want to cultivate rationality).
We're talking about Congo Kinshasa here, I mean, most of you here, who are not from the region have absolutely no idea about the state of that country. It's a mess.
Internet is the least of the locals worries, many of whom are on a daily survival mode because of the war, can't even read and are strongly influenced by all sort of superstitions.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. A lot of them living in remote places controlled by militias never had access to the internet at first place.
Every generation does this. It doesn't mean that actually, the world is a fine place. It just means that your rose-colored glasses are coming off.
You cannot evaluate the actions taking place in that country and then apply them to the rest of the world.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ebola-discoverer-would-sit-n...
In Congo Kinshasa, it's just the chaos politically, there is no real government in many parts of this country, the real danger is that it is not a small country at all, 80+ millions of inhabitants, many can't be reach by the WHO because of the wars and infighting between the "government" and militias. So the crisis there has great chances of getting worse, not better.
Furthermore, many many many people locals despise foreigners and particularly white people, for historical reasons, or just ignorance, and the culture is extremely unsanitary (touching and living with the dead, consuming bush meat or worse, ritualistic cannibalism, and what not), some straight out think Ebola is a white conspiracy.
This isn't a problem only money can solve this time.
I would be careful of the use of the word 'civilized' in this context. You're implying DRC and/or other African countries are uncivilized. Which is just not true.
No, I stand by what I said and by the following definitions of the word "civilized", and never talked about "other African countries":
> easy to manage or control; well organized or ordered:
> having an advanced or humane culture, society, etc.
Given the tragedy that has been going on for more than half a century in that part of the world, I couldn't care less about euphemisms and political correctness, they have not solved anything.
The culture absolutely needs to evolve if locals want to survive Ebola, there is absolutely no way around it, I'm not a cultural relativist. It's a matter of life and death.
So the US meets these characteristics by your logic but DRC does not? Have you traveled much in rural/poor US? Have you been to puerto rico? Are those areas equally uncivilized? Would you characterize south chicago as uncivilized as well?
In anthropology (maybe specifically american anthropology), the descriptor 'civilized' was pretty much thrown out during their reformation (I think it was 1970s?). At best, today it's pretty much considered a coded term for 'not conforming to my view of what a society should look like'(aka it's ethnocentrically viewed as inferior). At worst, you can tie the usages of the descriptors 'barbaric' and 'civilized' back to the biological determinism and eugenics movements.
>Given the tragedy that has been going on for more than half a century in that part of the world, I couldn't care less about euphemisms and political correctness, they have not solved anything.
What tragedy? and which part of the world? DRC is not near Liberia or Guinea where the other more recent highly publicized Ebola outbreaks have been. Are you referring to the civil war in DRC? It's really complicated and at the end of the day has root causes that tie back to neocolonialism and colonialism constructs created by so-called civilized societies.
I'm not trying to be politically correct. I wasn't even being all that critical of your original statement. I was trying to point out that word choice matters. While most of what you wrote originally is valid, my family (which is Cameroonian) would not listen to anything you had to say because you used the term 'civilized.' It would immediately shut down discourse.
Europeans have tested harmful drugs on Africans without their knowledge for more than 2 centuries (including injecting live cancer cells and spreading HIV in very recent cases).
I don't think we can blame them for avoiding this treatment like the plague.
I'd still be wary of making too many excuses for their wanton attack and murder on health-care workers as mere suspicion, as that gives off an impression of racism of lower expectations, in my humble opinion. Or, I mean, even if it doesn't, at a certain point we need to draw the line at acceptable behavior. Whether it's their upbringing, or they are justifiably suspicions, they are evil, or they are uneducated, in the end it sort of doesn't matter, right? It's still some other group trying to kill other people, where we have a belief on which one is correct and which one isn't.
Just to throw it out there - I don't live there, I'm not a citizen of their community - why does my values judgement matter? Why am I judging what is acceptable for them to do in their neighborhoods and communities?
I'm a white american, married into an Cameroonian family, spend my time 90-10 split between US and Cameroon. If Cameroon was having a crisis over 'X', I'd ask my family and our friends what they think should be done in their cities about 'X.' I might ask questions or offer critiques but at the end of the day, they are the only ones that understand their communities, can solve their problems and judge a situation. Similarly, if my city was having an issue, I might be curious what they thought or how they solved similar issues, but I wouldn't expect them to dictate solutions or make a values judgement on my community.
There is a nihilistic rabbit hole this can take you down. Values are suspended in air, only there because we want them to be. Why is it unacceptable for people in their own neighborhoods and communities to murder others in cold blood?
Is it all relative? Is that a choice a community can take, that is equally valid as all other choices? Or should there be a preferred community, which all humans should strive towards. A civilized platonic ideal.
I'm okay with taking the more chauvinistic view that our way of living is better. Not the best. But better. I'm willing to claim that they would be better too if they became more educated, learned to understand it's best to not kill people based on witchcraft. This does involve me thinking that I am more civilized and above them on a hierarchy of values. I'm okay with that. I think you should be too.
This region of the African continent is one of the most exploited regions in the world. Some of the historical tension/mistrust can be tied back to the same hutu and tutsi divide that fed into the Rwandan genocide. I agree education is a key factor but I suspect the geopolitics is a bigger factor in the violence than beliefs in voodoo. They might be suspicious of the motivation of any outsider coming in and telling them what to do. Which is a natural response. If that's coupled with historical fear or traumatic memories of a past where outsiders came into communities and murdered community members, I could logically see some of these conflicts turning violent.
I do believe my overall quality of life might be better than theirs, but I don't believe that has anything to do with my values or my way of living. I also believe that quality of life is more due to structural factors - factors that are mostly out of control of the individual and their local community. So am I lucky to have lived my life in regions where the controlling interests have created favorable conditions? Yes, I am very lucky. Do I judge others who have not? No I try not to.
Could it be? Yes but you could argue for any number of diseases that "if it changed" would create devastating consequences.
When looking at death rates, it's important to remember that most Ebola outbreaks have occurred in countries with pre-modern sanitation & medical systems. It's like saying that cholera, scarlet fever, and bubonic plague are deadly diseases: true, but significantly less true in the developed world.