What does the guy who discovered & named the Ebola virus say about the current outbreak...

[stevenleser]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/04/ebola-zaire-peter-piot-outbreak

'In 1976 I discovered Ebola - now I fear an unimaginable tragedy'
Peter Piot was a researcher at a lab in Antwerp when a pilot brought him a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had fallen mysteriously ill in Zaire

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After Yambuku, you spent the next 30 years of your professional life devoted to combating Aids. But now Ebola has caught up to you again. American scientists fear that hundreds of thousands of people could ultimately become infected. Was such an epidemic to be expected?

No, not at all. On the contrary, I always thought that Ebola, in comparison to Aids or malaria, didn't present much of a problem because the outbreaks were always brief and local. Around June it became clear to me that there was something fundamentally different about this outbreak. At about the same time, the aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières sounded the alarm. We Flemish tend to be rather unemotional, but it was at that point that I began to get really worried.

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There is actually a well-established procedure for curtailing Ebola outbreaks: isolating those infected and closely monitoring those who had contact with them. How could a catastrophe such as the one we are now seeing even happen?

I think it is what people call a perfect storm: when every individual circumstance is a bit worse than normal and they then combine to create a disaster. And with this epidemic there were many factors that were disadvantageous from the very beginning. Some of the countries involved were just emerging from terrible civil wars, many of their doctors had fled and their healthcare systems had collapsed. In all of Liberia, for example, there were only 51 doctors in 2010, and many of them have since died of Ebola.
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More at above link

[stevenleser]

1. Kickety nt

[SheilaT]

2. To me the real elephant in the room here

is that these countries have rapidly growing populations. The ones with the current Ebola epidemic, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, have more than doubled their populations since Ebola was first discovered and named. So not only are there many more people to infect, but I wouldn't be surprised if overall their living conditions have either not improved in forty years, or perhaps have deteriorated some.

We know that there is almost no public health infrastructure in these countries. I understand that before this outbreak Liberia had a total of 51 doctors in the entire country, population over 4 million people. It is almost unthinkable that there are so few doctors for so many people. Oh, and we're not even sure how many of those 51 have died from Ebola.

While I still don't think the world at large is at any real risk from this disease, there are places, such as those three countries in Africa, where it could devastate their populations.

[KurtNYC]

3. Kick - a must read

[freshwest]

4. Conquest > War > Famine > Disease. Almost always in that exact same order.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are described in the last book of the New Testament of the Bible, called the Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ to Saint John the Evangelist at 6:1-8. The chapter tells of a book or scroll in God's right hand that is sealed with seven seals. The Lamb of God, or Lion of Judah (Jesus Christ), opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons four beings that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. Although some interpretations differ, in most accounts, the four riders are seen as symbolizing Conquest,[1] War,[2] Famine,[3] and Death, respectively. The Christian apocalyptic vision is that the four horsemen are to set a divine apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse&printable=yes

Symbolism, prophecy or just a rehash of how humans affairs sort out?

I suggest the latter. There has always been famine and disease coming from the destruction of civil order or society by war. It's a given, whether it's Africa, the Middle East, or in the Americas, Asia or Europe. They are all linked and they occur in order from destroying societies.

We know about the chaos and poverty which come from a displacement, with a massive theft or land, resources or assets, and there is more than one kind of war. The cycle seems to repeat itself and the only shield I can see from it is unity of all people, justice in social affairs and maintaining the belief that nurturing a civil society is a good thing.

Too many don't value it anymore, as it has now disintegrated which does advantage certain groups. I prefer this to a religious interpretation, but am still working in my mind a possible solution to strive toward, with little hope that the masses have the will to do anything but let it happen again and again, too taken in by diversions.

Most likely not what you expected as an answer, but the OP indicates three of those factors in play. And whether people will believe in this as some sort of spiritual event, a judgement or whatever they choose, it happened so many times, that we should work hard to stop the beginning of the cycle and work to prevent things getting to a tipping point even if war was not the trigger.

JMHO.

[AverageJoe90]

5. There are some *very real* concerns about West Africa, indeed. Thanks for posting, Steven. nt