40 thousand people have received the vaccine.
So far the outbreak has tallied some 500 cases, about half of whom have died, according to the DRC’s Ministry of Public Health. It spans a region of the DRC’s northeast that abuts four other countries, and Salama and many others worry about the deadly virus jumping a border, which would require separate response teams and boost the potential for wider spread by infecting people with increased transportation options.
Without more financial and personnel support from wealthy countries, the situation could explode into a long-running calamity similar to the Ebola epidemic that devastated three West African countries from 2014 to 2016, warns an editorial published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
A consensus statement from 25 public health and policy experts published the same week in The Journal of the American Medical Association calls the outbreak “exceptionally” dangerous. The editorials urge the U.S. government to change a policy that prevents its Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from sending staff to the region because of security concerns.
well, unless they send in the Marines (Or hire a bunch of mercs from Blackwater), the CDC personnel would be risking their lives, not from Ebola but from local violence including kidnappers and thieves who attack hospitals and clinics and those driving down roads without guards.
I worked during a war, and several of my friends were killed, so maybe I take this more seriously than those sitting in offices in Chicago (JAMA).
a lot of the work can be done by locals, as I noted in an earlier post.
And yes, they are under threat too...
one only has to look at the health care workers, many local folks, in Afghanistan and Pakistan who have been kidnapped or killed trying to help people. At least they were volunteers.
No comments:
Post a Comment