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Ebola Quarantine Center In Liberia Looted
An anonymous reader writes The BBC and other outlets are reporting that a major quarantine center for patients who have been infected with the Ebola virus in Liberia has been looted and ransacked. Reports vary on the motive of the attack, but officials have confirmed that the Ebola patients are missing and that the quarantine center's medical supplies have been stolen. Officials say that the looters are highly likely to contract the virus themselves and worsen the epidemic further, as the WHO counts 1000+ lives claimed by the virus total."
Start mass-producing the Darwin Awards.
Maybe we can create group Award, now that Darwinism has become a team sport!
I think it's necessary to understand what's going on Liberia. People there are uneducated, prone to superstition and there's a lot of ignorance about the Ebola outbreak over there, however people are acting rationally based on what they see. What they've seen is that when people go to one of these facilities, they tend to end up dead. If you're living there, ignorance of modern medicine and viruses and whatnot and you witness a loved one being taken to a hospital, it's understandable why people will not take it willingly.
A lot of people think this is some "white-man's poison" that's infecting and killing folks. There's enough bad history with westerners fucking around with Africa that you can't really blame them for being predisposed to being suspicious at what doctor's are doing. Of course, that doesn't mean the situation is great for all concerned - it just isn't that surprising giving the environment.
Unfortunately this is the sort of event that can make this virus' infections rates soar beyond control.
Because of a small group of idiots the majority will suffer needlessly.
I see some say "fuck 'em" and some have this attitude of not our problem - for lack of understanding that their problem can become our problem. If that's not a case for a reason to put more resources into education I don't know what is.
It's everyone's problem when some person in Liberia, is now scared for his life and flees without knowing he is carrying the virus. In 48 hours he might be sitting next to you on a bus! -what are you going to say when people start bleeding their internal organs out of all orifices?
You want to give out Darwin awards? start by considering you may get one yourself with such an attitude.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
No gay sex means the vast majority of the AIDS infections never happen.
It's good for Africa that they never liked gays there, otherwise they would have an AIDS epidemic on their hands by now. Oh, wait...
Ezekiel 23:20
You live in a country with a wildly corrupt government that repeatedly lies to you and regularly unburdens you of your basic human rights. Then one day, officials from this government force you and everyone you know at gunpoint to submit to a series of "tests." You notice that, all of a sudden, many of the most social and/or eldest (therefore vocal, therefore most likely to be community leaders/government dissenters) among you go missing and later mysteriously die. For good measure, a number of kids randomly disappear and die as well. The ones that survive tell horrible stories about the dismal conditions in which they were held, where they were injected with any number of things and only a few days later, became sick . The government (the same government that lies to you and considers you subhuman) tells you that the cultural practices that have been with your group for a thousand years are all of a sudden, just now, for reasons they don't have time to explain, causing you to get sick and die, and it just happens to selectively be wiping out the kids and the community leaders.
If it were the US doing this, I conjecture that at the very least, this comment thread would have a radically different tone. Less "these guys are idiots," and more "these guys are heroes." What we're witnessing in Liberia is a tragic consequence of a corrupt power structure attempting, maybe for the first time, to legitimately help people that it has previously subjugated. The whole thing smacks of people acting in their and their community's best interests based on many many previous data points telling them government=bad, therefore avoid government. Unfortunately, it takes time to build a relationship of trust between a government and its citizens, and in the face of the calamity that Liberia is confronting, neither the government nor its citizens have any time to spare.
It used to be something of a tradition in the west for doctors not to wash their hands. After all, all disease was based in an imbalance of the "humours" of the body.
Then this guy appeared. Zemmel? Something like that. He realized that the doctors who worked for him at his two hospitals were helping with childbirths while also doing a bit of corpse work on the side. He noticed that by having his doctors wash their hands after handling dead bodies, the amount of deaths to a particular disease dropped considerable.
Of course nobody believed him, because HUMOURS.
Then he died and another doctor took over. He scrapped the handwashing regime and deaths from disease immediately spiked back up to SIX TIMES what it had been when Zemmel (or whatever his name was) was the chief doctor. And nobody cared: Because obviously humours were the true cause.
That was Semmelweis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...