Public Response to EBOLA

[Donald G]

CASTANET NEWS ITEM ON EBOLA

Security forces acting on the president's orders used scrap wood and barbed wire to seal off 50,000 people inside their crowded slum Wednesday in an attempt to contain the Ebola outbreak, which has killed 1,350 people and counting.

Hundreds of slum residents clashed with the police and soldiers, furious that their West Point peninsula is being blamed and isolated by a government that has failed to quickly collect dead bodies from the streets of the capital.

The World Health Organization raised the total death toll to 1,350, and said deaths are mounting fastest in Liberia, which now accounts for at least 576. The U.N. health agency also warned that "countries are beginning to experience supply shortages, including fuel, food, and basic supplies."

This comes after a number of airlines and shipping services have halted transport to population centres in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. And if the situation in these capitals is bad, it's much worse inside West Point, a huge slum that occupies a narrow spit of land in Liberia's capital of Monrovia.

Hundreds of residents of the seaside slum threw rocks and challenged the riot police and soldiers who installed the barricades Wednesday, but were soon suppressed. A coast guard boat patrolled sewage-strewn waters offshore, and the president imposed a nighttime curfew.

With many families divided by the barricades, people were particularly angry when the local government representative, who had not slept at home, returned to get her family out under an armed escort. Hundreds surrounded her house until security forces packed the family into a car and hustled them away, firing into the air to disperse the crowd.

Deputy Police Chief Abraham Kromah said later Wednesday that forces managed to restore order and were investigating to see if shots had been fired.

Fear and tension have been building in Monrovia for days, and West Point has been one of the flash points. West Point residents raided an Ebola screening centre over the weekend, accusing officials of bringing sick people from all over Monrovia into their neighbourhood.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf ordered the barricades and the curfew.

"We have been unable to control the spread" of Ebola, Sirleaf said in an address to the nation Tuesday night. She blamed the rising case toll on denial, defiance of authorities and cultural burial practices, in which bodies are handled. But many feel the government has not done enough to protect them, leaving bodies in the streets for hours or even days.

[Donald G]

The above article which describes the response of the government authorities and general public to the ongoing effort to bring the latest outbreak of EBOLA, in many ways, is a description of how "people" responded to the Bubonic Plague in history.

Although much more is known about diseases by the more advanced nations today the inability of the masses of people involved to accept being quarantined seems to be based partly on an individual and collective lack of knowledge (on the part of the 50,000 potential victims) and partly on the fear of being "boxed in" with the sick and dying. Sacrificed as one would feel.

Human nature has not changed. Nor has our ongoing human evolutionary battle with mutating diseases.

[xjeepguy]

When I first read about this outbreak many months ago , I knew it was going to be bad. Just by the reports coming out back then and them dealing with the different strain. Its going to get a whole lot uglier too .

[Donald G]

Fifty thousand people "fenced in" with the disease is about the population of Kelowna proper. I wonder what the people of Kelowna would do individually and collectively if they were told that until the almost invariably fatal Ebola had run its course they would be confined, by force, to the area identified as the one in which the thousand previous victims had lived and died.

Especially when food and water became scarce and dead people started to show up outside of the hospital, in the parks and along roadways?

And stories began to circulate about "favoured" people (with connections) being permitted to leave and people being turned away from food and shelter by someone with a gun.

[xjeepguy]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-case ... -1.2749071

[Donald G]

To xjeepguy ...

The article points out the benefit of large Conglomerates like Glasosmithklein who have the highly organized researchers, laboratories and research equipment to successfully battle frequently changing and evolving serious diseases such as Ebola.

We may speak against their initial profit margins and drug patents but when it comes to potentially saving thousands of lives what should we consider a fair price for the millions that they invest in such research?

IMO large conglomerates like Glasosmithklein are at the core of the difference between our ability to respond to Ebola and our inability to be able to respond the the Bubonic Plague that killed millions of people around the world before it ran its course.