Here’s why deadly viruses are on the rise in Africa

[LONDONER]

http://qz.com/276617/first-ebola-now-mar...a&ns_fee=0

[Alex]

You know I was supposed to go help with the spread in Africa, but now this is getting scarier by the minute. it doesn't matter if I'm a doctor and i'd take all possible precautions it seems that it would get to me anyway. And what you just post scared the shit out of me now (well I guess I can be fucked now lol). I'm staying and help the kids here instead. Fuck that shit!

[LONDONER]

You know I was supposed to go help with the spread in Africa, but now this is getting scarier by the minute. it doesn't matter if I'm a doctor and i'd take all possible precautions it seems that it would get to me anyway. And what you just post scared the shit out of me now (well I guess I can be fucked now lol). I'm staying and help the kids here instead. Fuck that shit!

As the articles says, most African countries simply don't have the facilities to be able to isolate those infected let alone treat them.

[Pix]

There are so many terrifying diseases there. The worst one that comes to mind is a parasite you can catch if you fall into the Volta River (or even dip your hand in it and then drip some of its water on your food or otherwise allow it entry into your body) and it causes your stomach to bloat out as the parasites multiply and blood comes out of all your orifices. Can't recall the name of it offhand. (ETA: okay, it's schistosomiasis, but that link doesn't go into all the gory details of a report I read in which explorers contracted it.)

[Bowyn Aerrow]

Looking at human history as a whole, we find that deadly pandemics like to sweep through the human population about once a century, with super-deadly pandemics cropping up every 500 years. Then there are 'serious' pandemics (not necessarily deadly) that crop up every 25 years or so.

Then we have epidemics, outbreaks and other not so global pathogens that crop up on a regular basis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics for an incomplete list, and the reason why there are large holes in earlier times is not because disease didn't exist, its because disease was such a part of human life no one bothered to keep track of it all.

Conclusion, Mother Nature hates humanity and always seeks to stomp out the cancer which is humanity.

Was Ebola Behind the Black Death?

Controversial new research suggests that contrary to the history books, the "Black Death" that devastated medieval Europe was not the bubonic plague, but rather an Ebola-like virus.
History books have long taught the Black Death, which wiped out a quarter of Europe's population in the Middle Ages, was caused by bubonic plague, spread by infected fleas that lived on black rats. But new research in England suggests the killer was actually an Ebola-like virus transmitted directly from person to person.
The Black Death killed some 25 million Europeans in a devastating outbreak between 1347 and 1352, and then reappeared periodically for more than 300 years. Scholars had thought flea-infested rats living on ships brought the disease from China to Italy and then the rest of the continent.
But researchers Christopher Duncan and Susan Scott of the University of Liverpool say that the flea-borne bubonic plague could not have torn across Europe the way the Black Death did.
"If you look at the way it spreads, it was spreading at a rate of around 30 miles in two to three days," says Duncan. "Bubonic plague moves at a pace of around 100 yards a year."

(truncated for length)

If this is this case, then how did an African disease get to Europe before it became known as a plague? Are you going to tell me that mining, deforestation and farming in Africa was that common to lead to Ebola meeting humans and spreading via air flights to and from affected regions?

And it causes us to pause and wonder about other diseases and earlier pandemics and outbreaks. We pretend to know what happened, we don't know. Still guessing, still putting pieces together to come up with new and terrifying conclusions.

Sure human industry is opening the doors for new and more interesting diseases to meet the human population, however history makes it clear that those new and interesting diseases are always looking for new ways to meet humanity.

The past couple decades the CDC/WHO and other have been on the look out for the next deadly pandemic. They know its coming. That is why they shit bricks in 2009 with that novel Swine Flu. We were lucky, it wasn't deadly like Spanish Flu - but it went pandemic rapidly and WHO/CDC and the best that Western Medicine and Western nations could throw at it could stop it.

I personally do not place much faith in Western Medicine.

Duncan in Dallas went to hospital, reported he has just arrived from Africa and was sent home with antibiotics for a diagnoses viral infection (I'm still puzzled about antibiotics, apparently we do not have enough super-bacteria immune to antibiotics). Giving him two extra days to spray the town with Ebola infected mucous and god only knows what else.... Vomit? Blood?

In Spain we have a trained nurse who ended up doing something inconsequential that ended up being a death sentence.

And UK Dude who just died from Suspected Ebola in Macedonia. What is interesting about this case is if it is Ebola, he didn't get it in Africa, he got it from the UK. I like how they are saying he bled out due to alcohol. Like so many people drink and die from hemorrhaging due to alcohol. Real reason? Unknown, so lets grab straws and pretend we know what we are talking about.

Which this is the real point. Human beings love to keep up the delusion that they know everything and have everything in control. Humans know nothing, have no control and are as helpless today in the fury of Mom Nature as they were a century ago, a thousand years ago.

I'm not going to buy into the notion that Western Nations are better prepared to deal with an outbreak of deadly pathogen.

Just look at how well the USA is dealing with a not so deadly outbreak of EV-D68.


The real reason why Africa is because Africa is the birthplace of the funny hairless monkey we call "Human". It is only natural that the environment that humans spent the most of their eons of evolution in would have the most pathogens to infect humans.

We can try to explain it away as an issue of politics, poverty, industry, but that is pretty much denying the foundational truth that pretty much everything on Earth hates us and wants us dead, especially tropical stuff.

[CuriousPhoenix]

Throughout history, humans have been subjected to epidemics and pandemics of diseases. Countless times, while studying history, you'll come across mentions of Rome or London or Paris being hit be an unknown diseases that killed tons of people then disappeared. In London it was called "The Sweating Sickness."

The reason for believing the Black Death was Bubonic Plague was because of where the pandemic started. Being Europe centric, we focus on the events in Europe, but the plague started in the east and spread west. It wiped out millions of people around the global. Of course the good thing about the Black Death is that it allowed for the rise of the middle class and ushered in the Renaissance.

The reason we are so afraid of viruses is because our bodied can't fight viruses like bacteria. Our body recognizes bacteria and fights off the infection but viruses just multiply until they start causing problems. The only way to deal with a virus is to deal with the symptoms, so that eventually your body can build the antibodies for it, or to develop an expensive vaccine. The only vaccines drug companies would create are those of the most prevalent viruses because its expensive to develop. If they develop a vaccine for a virus that isn't common and not deadly, no one would take it and they would lose money.

[StingRay]

We got through some training about enterovirus over a month ago. Last week we got had 2 hours on how to deal with possible ebola cases and what to look for. If it gets bad the might even shut the off ramps from the interstates and some towns may set up barricades to stop out of state traffic from stopping. With that hospital in Nebraska being the number 1 place to isolate ebola patients is too close by for some people here to feel comfortable.

All we can hope for is that they catch this and get it under control pretty soon.

[Bowyn Aerrow]

StingRay,

Now where did you get that information about barricades and stuff? During training from a trainer?

I'm curious.

[Cuddly]

Maybe I'm stupid, but I'm not afraid of ebola.

I'm much more afraid of what we're doing to the environment and what we're doing to each other because of trivial things like religion and sexuality. All it takes to blow up enough nukes to completely wipe earth from existance is one nut-job with enough power.

There are people who walk away alive after having been infected with the ebola virus, so the species will survive, for better or worse.
Interestingly, the ebola virus is also a RNA-virus, like HIV and both target white blood cells (not exclussively). Maybe they come up with something that fights both viruses.

Also, looking through the english wiki page, the earlier cases have only had a couple of hundred infected (curiously low number, maybe only few out of many cases were reported - who gives a shit while it's staying in africa, right? ), while the current outbreak is measuring 8000+, with a deathrate of about 50%.

[Aike]

Which this is the real point. Human beings love to keep up the delusion that they know everything and have everything in control. Humans know nothing, have no control and are as helpless today in the fury of Mom Nature as they were a century ago, a thousand years ago.

I'm not going to buy into the notion that Western Nations are better prepared to deal with an outbreak of deadly pathogen.

Just look at how well the USA is dealing with a not so deadly outbreak of EV-D68.

The real reason why Africa is because Africa is the birthplace of the funny hairless monkey we call "Human". It is only natural that the environment that humans spent the most of their eons of evolution in would have the most pathogens to infect humans.

We can try to explain it away as an issue of politics, poverty, industry, but that is pretty much denying the foundational truth that pretty much everything on Earth hates us and wants us dead, especially tropical stuff.

It's not the case that developed countries aren't significantly better equipped to deal with issues of health. The history of the demographic transition and persisting high mortality rates in developing countries fly in the face of this claim. The current Ebola crisis can also be accounted for by referring to the inequality of global healthcare, as Dr. Paul Farmer explains in an interview here. To simply sweep the history of colonialism and current economic exploitation of the African continent under the rug is to obfuscate the politics behind healthcare.

As for puny humans and the fury of Mother Nature, I think we need to abandon this mythological narrative about Nature (with a capital "N") putting the mankind to its proper place. I might be falsely attributing it to your post but that's what I'm sensing here anyway. Although it seems secular and self-depreciating, it has a strictly religious structure: the human being is contrasted with a big Divine Other. The problem is that this Divine Other is always a human invention. The truly difficult thing to accept is the utter meaninglessness of nature. There is no Mother Nature who will punish us for our sins and restore the proper Order of the Universe (for there is no such thing).

The reason I'm opposed to this kind of argumentation is that it obfuscates the actual social situation and only benefits those in power. For what's more convenient for the ruling class than an ideology, which explains all the wrongs we see in our society not by pointing out the actually existing relations of exploitation and domination but by some kind of an apolitical mythical narrative about human existence?