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Ebola Outbreak Declared Global Health Emergency
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Ebola outbreak declared global health emergency
The World Health Organization has declared the Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo a "public health emergency of international concern". The move may encourage wealthy donor countries to provide more cash.
But the WHO stopped short of saying borders should be closed, saying the risk of the disease spreading outside the region was not high.
The outbreak in DR Congo has killed more than 1,600 people. This week, the first case was detected in Goma, home to more than a million. The PHEIC emergency provision is the highest level of alarm the WHO can sound and has only been used four times previously. This includes the Ebola epidemic that devastated parts of West Africa from 2014 to 2016, and killed more than 11,000 people.
"It is time for the world to take notice," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva on Wednesday at which the emergency was declared. He said he accepted recommendations there should be no restrictions on travel or trade, and no entry screening of passengers at ports or airports outside the immediate region.
"While it does not change the reality on the ground for victims or partners engaged in the response, we hope it will bring the international attention that this crisis deserves," it said in a statement.
WHO Declares Ebola Outbreak an International Emergency
From WHO declares Ebola outbreak an international emergency
The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the nearly year-long Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
The outbreak was declared on August 1, 2018 and has tallied 2,512 cases and 1,676 deaths. So far, it's centered in the DRC's North Kivu and Ituri provinces, which are on the eastern side of the country bordering South Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda.
The declaration Wednesday follows the spread of Ebola to Goma, a DRC city of nearly 2 million people at the border with Rwanda that acts as hub of regional transportation. On Sunday, health workers there confirmed the city's first case in a 47-year-old pastor who had just arrived from Butembo, a DRC city that has struggled with the outbreak since last December.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies welcomed the move.
Previously: Measles is Killing More People in the DRC than Ebola-and Faster
(Score: 5, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday July 18 2019, @04:47PM (18 children)
One of the Nova episodes about one of the Ebola outbreaks (I think they've done two) pointed out that Ebola jumped borders despite border screenings. Because someone in a village who started to have symptoms was scared, and walked the 6 miles to another village and crossed the border in the process.
The notion that one can quarantine something nationally is fantasy. Better to (at most) stop and screen every person for symptoms, and even then you'll have people get past it.
The short answer is no.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @05:47PM (12 children)
They walked 6 miles with ebola?
(Score: 2) by Farmer Tim on Thursday July 18 2019, @06:25PM (9 children)
Came for the news, stayed for the soap opera.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @07:04PM (8 children)
> It is believed that between people, Ebola disease spreads only by direct contact with the blood or other body fluids of a person who has developed symptoms of the disease.[48][49][50] Body fluids that may contain Ebola viruses include saliva, mucus, vomit, feces, sweat, tears, breast milk, urine and semen.[4][35] The WHO states that only people who are very sick are able to spread Ebola disease in saliva, and whole virus has not been reported to be transmitted through sweat. Most people spread the virus through blood, feces and vomit....when someone has symptoms of the disease, they are unable to travel without assistance
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease [wikipedia.org]
Why are people coming into contact w blood, vomit, and feces if there are no symptoms?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday July 18 2019, @09:08PM (7 children)
Because the symptoms can be mistaken for typhoid or some gastroenteric condition like some (rarer) forms of food poisoning or (very rarely) flu - most influenzas do not involve vomiting, but still.
All the family member knows is the person is sick. So they take care of them as best they can. And contract the disease.
Maybe the person tries to clean themselves up after diarrhea and the hand accidentally contacts some feces and the person either doesn't see it or doesn't wash their hands well enough. Now everything touched is a possible infector. It is known to spread via fomites (technical name for the host contacting inanimate objects that the receiver then touches).
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @04:36AM (6 children)
So ebola is like a bad case of food poisoning. Then it sucks but isn't that bad unless you are in the middle of nowhere without proper access to sanitation and climate control and fluids.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @11:45AM (1 child)
I seriously hope that it emerges in the white world soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @02:38PM
Point #1 If it does you can bet it will be in the densest part of the bluest of liberal areas.
Point #2 This is exactly the kind of thing that demonstrates the racism inherent in the left.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 19 2019, @02:21PM (2 children)
Not a great analogy, because food poisioning is usually bacterial although 1/3rd of cases are indeed viral. But true only if the food poisoning has a 50%-90% fatality rate that induces clotting all over the vascular system which can cause systemic hemorrhage. It's not like botulism where if you get the person respiratory support (put them on ventillator when necessary from 2-8 weeks) the person usually pulls through even without antitoxin. And while EVD is a contact disease it isn't just enteral as many food poisonings are, but rather believed to be mucous membrane contact which transmits it IIRC.
There are treatments and vaccines still in development for EVD as well. But the point is, more like many viruses, there is little to be done except supportive care once one has contracted the disease. Supportive care is still very important, but it isn't like there's a magic protocol which makes the virus go away.
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(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 19 2019, @02:38PM (1 child)
EVD?
Do you mean Ebola?
I looked up EVD and all I found was External ventricular drain, which is probably not what you meant.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 19 2019, @03:31PM
Ebola Virus Disease [who.int], the 'official' name of Ebola now instead of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. Ebola is a river near where the first cases were identified in 1976.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 19 2019, @02:22PM
What I missed saying but implied was that just because one has climate control and fluids does not equal recovery, as it does with many types of food poisoning.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday July 18 2019, @09:05PM (1 child)
This is how I remember it... I tried looking for the reference but couldn't find it, so if I'm wrong then I'm wrong. I thought it was during the 2014 Sierra Leone outbreak but I could really be wrong about that. The story as I remember it was that the woman was sick, and she knew it, but was afraid to go to the treatment center in her town where the outbreak was occurring. So she made a night border crossing across the "river" into another village where she had relatives, but it was over the border. African countries' borders are fairly porous. The authorities caught up to her and treated her, and she survived. ("Treatment" then meaning supportive care and hopefully the immune system fights it off.)
We have this image that Ebola is a thing where you are bleeding out of every orifice with arterial level gushing. Bleeding can in fact happen, but only 18% [nih.gov] present with it as a symptom before disease detection. The patient is much more likely to be hypovolemic and therefore without a lot of resources to bleed.
The notion is that if you close the border the people who are desperate will still find ways to cross a few miles to either side of it. Keep the border open but screen people and you might be able to get the people who need treatment into treatment. The advantage is that the disease isn't infectious until symptoms appear but the symptoms can be mistaken for typhoid or other diseases. The disadvantage is that the symptoms can be mild.
Here's the question... if you had fever and bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, maybe a little bit of bloody in the stool but your body has played out for the moment, do you think you could walk 5 miles if you thought that meant safety to you? I could do it if I had to and I'm not an athelete.
One of the other things that those who work with the disease are learning is that they can't just don their protective gear and walk into a village. They have to go in with civvies and then put on the gear to decontaminate if they find a suspected case.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday July 19 2019, @01:19PM
Not to mention people who are infected, travel, and then exhibit symptoms and become infectious.
"There is ebola in my village, I'm getting out of here"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 19 2019, @12:34AM (4 children)
I had a professor in college, David Laitin [stanford.edu], who used to make a point about Africa and its politics that is relevant here: Africa's political borders are not congruent with its ethnic, tribal, cultural, or linguistic borders. In other words, identity formation there is not necessarily bounded by nation-state constructs.
So people of one tribe on one side of a national border might think nothing of crossing that border to seek refuge with other members of that tribe on the other side of the national border, because those affective ties are much stronger than the artificial political ones imposed by European colonial powers a couple hundred years ago. It has always been cited in political science circles as an intractable cause of political dysfunction in Africa, but it probably complicates epidemiological attempts to control outbreaks as well.
It gets even more complicated when considering that those fuzzy borders blur across the parts of Africa that are part of the Islamic sphere; that might help it jump to other nations outside Africa even if all flights and ships from Africa were blocked.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @07:35AM (2 children)
Why is that, do you think?
(Just re-enforcing your point.)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday July 19 2019, @11:59AM (1 child)
My guess on this one would be because the idea of nation-state borders as we think of them was largely a European construct imposed on Africa? Hell, that's one reason the Middle East is so completely fucked up; the Balfour Declaration drew arbitrary lines in the sand, almost literally, and cut right across tribal and familial borders without so much as a by-your-leave. Cultural mismatches kill.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 19 2019, @02:26PM
The Partition of India, as well.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Friday July 19 2019, @07:43AM
even if all flights and ships from Africa were blocked.
A large part of the population is completely disconnected from urbanised life. For thousands of years, they
have travelled in small boats by river or sea, or by camel over land, for weeks, with no concern for governments,
which mostly lack skill, resources or any kind of good intention, and you may understand how this view is
sufficiently westernised to lack any grip on reality.
or, for Americans:
Imagine you are the Trump government, and you have to round up people in remote parts of Appalachia
and explain to them that they are in danger from aliens who escaped from Area 51. Now think of Appalachia
being as big as USA + Canada, with the entire US government played by Chuck Norris and Will Smith,
led by Homer Simpson, and then multiply the problems by 10.
When you say tribe, in this context, you mean "immediate family".
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!