An Ebola outbreak in a southwestern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is escalating quickly, as some health responders say they have less than a tenth of the funding needed to contain the deadly disease.
As of this week, there have been at least 57 cases and 35 deaths—a 61 percent fatality rate, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The Obama admin had an outstanding response to Ebola and even wrote a playbook on outbreaks. They stopped the us from getting Ebola. Trump three it out in 2016 and that’s why 2020 looked the way it did. If this isn’t stopped by a global superpower we will have worse than 2020. Ebola is messy.
In the past, the US Agency for International Development, USAID, has provided critical support to respond to such outbreaks. But, with funding cuts and a dismantling of the agency by the Trump administration, the US is notably absent, and health officials fear it will be difficult to compensate for the loss.
And let me add: what the USA saves here in $$$ is peanuts.
Not to speak of the benefit such aid would have had for the USA as well (this is touched on in the article).
When Ebola mutates to become able to infect via aerosolised droplets - like coughs and sneezes - we have a very serious problem. And apparently it’s not a difficult mutation.
Simply speaking puts those droplets into the air, lingering for 8 minutes, which is massive. Sneezing and coughing spread it farther, but aren’t necessary for spreading that way.
This has been a fun fact, please like and subscribe or whatever.
Yeah, Ebola is currently spread by body fluids, pretty similar to HIV. When a person dies of ebola there is a lot of vomiting blood, convulsing, spraying blood from all orifices - it’s not a peaceful death, and leaves the room they died in looking like a slaughterhouse.
Anyone tending them who has even a tiny scratch and gets that infected blood in their body, even if a bit gets in their eye, they are well fucked. A lot of people are also infected cleaning and preparing the body for funeral rites.
Now imagine that shit mutating to aerosol transmission so it could be spread by coughs etc. That shit would make covid look like a pathetic amateur.
And from what I understand (I’m no expert, this is just from stuff I’ve read) viruses like this mutate quickly. IIRC a few years ago a team in Sweden or somewhere tried it in a lab, to see how easy it was to create an aerosolised version of ebola and found it was very easy. IIRC their paper was blocked from publication so as not to give terrorists any jazzy ideas.
Anyone wanting to read a scary book about ebola, I highly recommend the hot zone by Richard Preston.
Its a good idea to offer aid to these countries. If not for the humanitarian reasons that the ghouls in charge cant grasp, but for the good of the citizens in the US.
Keeping those diseases in control in Africa and South America, keeps them from spreading to the US.
At this point it might help the US to wipe out a bunch of it’s citizens.
You assume that the ghouls care about American lives
I doubt that the Orange can get beyond “but it will cost me helping them”. I also wonder whether EU could help more.
Sixty one percent death rate?? What in the fuckity fuck
With an average 50 and up to 90 😵💫 I wonder what happened to the ebola vaccine.
I keep a CB radio in my car. It’s nice for keeping in contact with friends in another car on long road trips in places with bad cell service, and sometimes you can get useful traffic/road condition updates from truckers.
I also thought it might be nice to just kind of listen to the trucker chatter on long drives alone to stave off boredom and loneliness. Unfortunately, it turns out trucker conversations are rarely worth listening too, at best it’s usually stupid juvenile babbling, but there’s usually at least one lunatic ranting about politics and conspiracy theories.
Back when I still made an attempt to listen, there was one guy in my area a lot who was particularly unhinged.
This was back around 2014 or so, there was another ebola outbreak in Africa somewhere
And this guy was absolutely convinced that Obama was behind it somehow.
Funny thing about that, I remember a whole lot of conservatives being worked up about that outbreak, sure it was gonna become a pandemic. Some of them were even panic-buying masks. Weird how less than a decade later suddenly none of them wanted to wear those masks.
That ebola outbreak worried them enough that Obama created a task force to create a rapid response plan for the event of a major pandemic on US soil. We were lucky Obama was in office and surged aid. Now we fucked USAID and left the WHO under Trump.
Trump basically threw that plan in the trash when covid came.
Studies would later show Trump’s incompetence was responsible for 40% of the deaths. Meaning they were preventable.
