5 ms·

Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly"

119 points by Brajeshwar 5mo ago

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
This unfortunately won’t be news again until, and I think this is now an until versus if, we find evidence the disease is spreading uncontrollably outside the DRC.
- SilverElfin 5mo ago
  I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.
  - scotty79 5mo ago
    You think an outbreak, in for example Belgium, would be 24/7 news in Demorcatic Republic of Congo?
    - rjsw 5mo ago
      The DRC is a former Belgian colony, so yes.
      - TFNA 5mo ago
        Have you ever been to the DRC? Its former colonial master plays almost no role in Congolese society. Belgium made little effort to spread its culture to its colony, rather like the Dutch in Indonesia. Then, after independence, most of the population became isolated from the outside world as central government and education broke down, and the main impact on the country’s politics from outside came from larger, stronger powers than Belgium was.
    - idiotsecant 5mo ago
      This is such a weirdly tilted and aggressive response, complete with Facebook style demand to prove some strawman nobody ever claimed. Yes, outbreaks of extremely contagious and deadly disease often are major news stories in other countries, and yes western nations often ignore outbreaks in global south nations.
      - mft_ 5mo ago
        You might not like the tone, but I don’t think it is a strawman argument. The discussion is about whether the western media is paying insufficient attention to the Ebola outbreak simply because it’s in DRC, and DRC/Africa doesn’t matter. The post you responded to is suggesting a different hypothesis: that the media is paying limited attention because it’s in a country quite a long way away, on a different continent. In line with this hypothesis, it’s not unreasonable to question how much attention the press in countries a long way away would focus on a viral outbreak in a European country.
  - jansan 5mo ago
    If that outbreak was in a midsize European town like Marburg they would even name the virus after it.
    - bananamogul 5mo ago
      But not if there was a virus that broke out in, say, Wuhan.
  - nekzn 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tkz1312 5mo ago
      I mean it obviously impacts the people who live in the Congo...
    - iammjm 5mo ago
      it doesn't until it does
  - mentalgear 5mo ago
    Exemplified by the ridiculous Hanta-Virus news/social media coverage for weeks - even though the risks were much lower and contained - but it happened on a CRUISE ship which the news people thought might resonate with the western vacation crowd.
    - SilverElfin 5mo ago
      I view that situation differently. The Andes strain of hantavirus does spread human to human and isn’t well understood. I think caution and coverage makes sense. After all, someone caught it just sitting near an infected person on a plane.
- somenameforme 5mo ago
  Ebola isn't like most people think. It isn't airborne, isn't respiratory and requires direct contact with blood/semen/feces/etc to spread. It's also only known to be contagious once symptoms are present. The risk of a global outbreak is very low. Africa has a large array of unique circumstances that make it much more 'viral' there, including various cultural funerary rituals that involve contact with corpses that can have extremely high viral loads, bushmeat consumption/processing (ebola can spread from animals to humans), as well as all the more stereotypical (and accurate nonetheless) reasons as well that make it particularly dangerous for healthcare workers there. It's not entirely clear how it could spread uncontrollably outside of Africa.
  - dyauspitr 5mo ago
    Viruses are viruses though. Becoming airborne and less deadly (like this current strain) would be a death knell for the world. The longer you let it hang around the longer it has time to adapt. This is why HIV medication is prescribed so overwhelmingly. One of the main goals is to stop all replication immediately or it rather quickly “figures out” how to get past the drug.
    - jopsen 5mo ago
      There has been a lot of HIV going around, I have yet to hear reports that it's gone airborne. But, yes, I would rather not have an outbreak of ebola.
      - dyauspitr 5mo ago
        HIV is a very weak virus. Ebola is significantly more robust.
    - somenameforme 5mo ago
      Ebola thrives in African animal populations, so it has basically forever to do whatever you think it might do - though I'd add that in basically all scenarios viruses become more mild over time. It's not just good luck but because it maximizes transmissibility - killing your host usually means you die too. And that may well be why ebola remains so nasty to humans - we're not its primary reservoir, it's fruit bats which maintain persistent asymptomatic ebola infections, and are often the source of the first human infection in outbreaks.
aleister_777 5mo ago
[flagged]
- srameshc 5mo ago
  > headlines screaming apocalypse. Same bat country, same fear cycle From the article "deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced". People are dying on the planet we all belong to.
  - ineedasername 5mo ago
    There is a certain mindset that looks at any series of a problem that didn't get worse as evidence that any reaction to it was unwarranted, without considering if it was the why behind the lack of catastrophe. The opposite failure modes are things like security theatre and reasoning from any remotely plausible hypothetical to any desired response, and it's continually frustrating to see people who see neither modes or have a pet peeve against one of them and so jump in the other direction rather than reflect a second on some middle path.
- ineedasername 5mo ago
  A scan of headlines doesn't show any "scream of apocalypse", not across multiple news aggregators, incognito mode, etc. Out of dozens I noticed maybe one or two that might have seemed a bit much. Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.
  - axus 5mo ago
christkv 5mo ago
You are only infectious during illness and it requires contact with fluids. It's exasperated by local funeral rituals where people interact with the dead body and get infected.
- zulux 5mo ago
  "relatives slept in the same room as the body, stayed beside it continuously, or had direct physical contact during overnight mourning." I’ll do my best to avoid the overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.
  - bananamogul 5mo ago
    This makes the recent burning of ebola clinic tents by angry relatives make more sense. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-tent-fire-congo-9.7210001 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-tent-fire-congo-9.721000...
  - BJones12 5mo ago
    This is a great example of how some cultures are better than others.
- SecretDreams 5mo ago
  So your claim is this won't be an issue for the rest of the world? What are the underlying implications from your statement?
  - christkv 5mo ago
    That it does not spread that easily and that its current spread is more a combination of factors in the specific area. War, hunger, refugees, culture and lack of education. It’s to say it’s hard for it to land and expand. Once you have symptoms the patient is also very quickly immobilized reducing the spread further.
- illusive4080 5mo ago
  0% chance this spreads rapidly in the first world.
arjie 5mo ago
> the US has “abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.” It’s interesting to note that in the end, there was no one else coming: we were it. A large amount of disease containment and control was just fronted by the United States. As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. It’s not that the Chinese century will have their massive industrial engine put to the tasks that America put hers to. It’s just that things won’t get done. Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
- hedora 5mo ago
  I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. The US was previously the center of international collaboration for science and technology, and that took decades to establish. The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars. The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?) I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically: 1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left 2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
  - pjot 5mo ago
    > The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars. Is this true? From years of watching Top Gear any Chinese car that was tested was laughably bad.
hedora 5mo ago
Like Trump 1.0’s handling of COVID, this outbreak is going to spread further and faster than it would have if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives. Those initiatives inevitably cost far less than the economic impact of outbreaks (the US is currently diverting international travelers), but the best deal maker in the history of the universe says they’re a “bad deal”, so the rest of the planet gets to suffer.
- BJones12 5mo ago
  > if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives There are ~197 countries in the world, you should also criticize the other 196 for also not wanting to pay for the exact same thing.
  - SecretDreams 5mo ago
    Maybe there could have been direct solicitation for funds from other countries before suddenly and dramatically pulling the plug on decades of hard work?
  - jeremyjh 5mo ago
    Maybe there should have been a plan. A period of notice and a transition plan. It couldn't happen, since the Trump administration does not believe in competence, only in spectacle.
    - delfinom 5mo ago
      More so none of them have actually started and ran a real successful business. Just trustfund babies who don't know how anything operates.
  - thinkingtoilet 5mo ago
    I'm American. I will criticize America. If you live in another country, you work there to improve how you help the least fortunate people on the planet. I'm not going to write letters to the government of Turkmenistan. It should also be noted America is the richest country in the history of the world so expecting to do more is quite reasonable.
jmpman 5mo ago
Grok is very defensive of Elon's role in the current Ebola outbreak. However if you push on Elon impacting Ebola monitoring, it will eventually admit that Elon's DOGE cancelled "some" Ebola prevention efforts very briefly, but in reality many Ebola related contracts and programs were not fully restored. "Surveillance capacity in eastern DRC weakened, contributing to the current Bundibugyo Ebola strain circulating undetected for an estimated 6–8 weeks before confirmation."
- ceejayoz 5mo ago
  A while back "oops, we accidentally canceled ebola monitoring" was a White House press conference laugh line made by Musk, in fact. https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2056461616162431323 https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2056461616162431323
  - mentalgear 5mo ago
    Fking Billionaire Wackos are going to be the death of all of us (while they will escape to their New Zealand underground bunkers staffed with robot servants).
- e12e 5mo ago
  I was curious if the basic ai chatbots behaved differently - been a while since I tried the same prompt across models..: Apparently Gemini is the late night news anchor: https://g.co/gemini/share/3504289b8dc8 https://g.co/gemini/share/3504289b8dc8 Chatgpt the art critic: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a11e80e-523c-83ea-9a1b-03329f860c03 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a11e80e-523c-83ea-9a1b-03329f860c... And grok somewhat of an apologist: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_4071d2b9-ae39-43cc-abf1-cda968c02c2e https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_4071d2b9-ae39-43cc-abf1-cd...
- WarmWash 5mo ago
  I understand the need for charity, and we should be doing it to support these countries. But I don't see how to logically make the connection that when you pull that charity back, you are now responsible for any crisis. That is exactly the argument that people who are against foreign aid make. Like I will help you walk and feed your dog if you can't all the time, but if I stop doing that and your dog gets sick, that's not my fault and I'm not a bad person.
iluvcommunism 5mo ago
[dead]

119 points by Brajeshwar 5mo ago

This unfortunately won’t be news again until, and I think this is now an until versus if, we find evidence the disease is spreading uncontrollably outside the DRC.

SilverElfin 5mo ago
I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.
- scotty79 5mo ago
  You think an outbreak, in for example Belgium, would be 24/7 news in Demorcatic Republic of Congo?
  - rjsw 5mo ago
    The DRC is a former Belgian colony, so yes.
    - TFNA 5mo ago
      Have you ever been to the DRC? Its former colonial master plays almost no role in Congolese society. Belgium made little effort to spread its culture to its colony, rather like the Dutch in Indonesia. Then, after independence, most of the population became isolated from the outside world as central government and education broke down, and the main impact on the country’s politics from outside came from larger, stronger powers than Belgium was.
  - idiotsecant 5mo ago
    This is such a weirdly tilted and aggressive response, complete with Facebook style demand to prove some strawman nobody ever claimed. Yes, outbreaks of extremely contagious and deadly disease often are major news stories in other countries, and yes western nations often ignore outbreaks in global south nations.
    - mft_ 5mo ago
      You might not like the tone, but I don’t think it is a strawman argument. The discussion is about whether the western media is paying insufficient attention to the Ebola outbreak simply because it’s in DRC, and DRC/Africa doesn’t matter. The post you responded to is suggesting a different hypothesis: that the media is paying limited attention because it’s in a country quite a long way away, on a different continent. In line with this hypothesis, it’s not unreasonable to question how much attention the press in countries a long way away would focus on a viral outbreak in a European country.
- jansan 5mo ago
  If that outbreak was in a midsize European town like Marburg they would even name the virus after it.
  - bananamogul 5mo ago
    But not if there was a virus that broke out in, say, Wuhan.
- nekzn 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tkz1312 5mo ago
    I mean it obviously impacts the people who live in the Congo...
  - iammjm 5mo ago
    it doesn't until it does
- mentalgear 5mo ago
  Exemplified by the ridiculous Hanta-Virus news/social media coverage for weeks - even though the risks were much lower and contained - but it happened on a CRUISE ship which the news people thought might resonate with the western vacation crowd.
  - SilverElfin 5mo ago
    I view that situation differently. The Andes strain of hantavirus does spread human to human and isn’t well understood. I think caution and coverage makes sense. After all, someone caught it just sitting near an infected person on a plane.
somenameforme 5mo ago
Ebola isn't like most people think. It isn't airborne, isn't respiratory and requires direct contact with blood/semen/feces/etc to spread. It's also only known to be contagious once symptoms are present. The risk of a global outbreak is very low. Africa has a large array of unique circumstances that make it much more 'viral' there, including various cultural funerary rituals that involve contact with corpses that can have extremely high viral loads, bushmeat consumption/processing (ebola can spread from animals to humans), as well as all the more stereotypical (and accurate nonetheless) reasons as well that make it particularly dangerous for healthcare workers there. It's not entirely clear how it could spread uncontrollably outside of Africa.
- dyauspitr 5mo ago
  Viruses are viruses though. Becoming airborne and less deadly (like this current strain) would be a death knell for the world. The longer you let it hang around the longer it has time to adapt. This is why HIV medication is prescribed so overwhelmingly. One of the main goals is to stop all replication immediately or it rather quickly “figures out” how to get past the drug.
  - jopsen 5mo ago
    There has been a lot of HIV going around, I have yet to hear reports that it's gone airborne. But, yes, I would rather not have an outbreak of ebola.
    - dyauspitr 5mo ago
      HIV is a very weak virus. Ebola is significantly more robust.
  - somenameforme 5mo ago
    Ebola thrives in African animal populations, so it has basically forever to do whatever you think it might do - though I'd add that in basically all scenarios viruses become more mild over time. It's not just good luck but because it maximizes transmissibility - killing your host usually means you die too. And that may well be why ebola remains so nasty to humans - we're not its primary reservoir, it's fruit bats which maintain persistent asymptomatic ebola infections, and are often the source of the first human infection in outbreaks.

aleister_777 5mo ago

[flagged]

srameshc 5mo ago
> headlines screaming apocalypse. Same bat country, same fear cycle From the article "deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced". People are dying on the planet we all belong to.
- ineedasername 5mo ago
  There is a certain mindset that looks at any series of a problem that didn't get worse as evidence that any reaction to it was unwarranted, without considering if it was the why behind the lack of catastrophe. The opposite failure modes are things like security theatre and reasoning from any remotely plausible hypothetical to any desired response, and it's continually frustrating to see people who see neither modes or have a pet peeve against one of them and so jump in the other direction rather than reflect a second on some middle path.
ineedasername 5mo ago
A scan of headlines doesn't show any "scream of apocalypse", not across multiple news aggregators, incognito mode, etc. Out of dozens I noticed maybe one or two that might have seemed a bit much. Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.
- axus 5mo ago

christkv 5mo ago

You are only infectious during illness and it requires contact with fluids. It's exasperated by local funeral rituals where people interact with the dead body and get infected.

zulux 5mo ago
"relatives slept in the same room as the body, stayed beside it continuously, or had direct physical contact during overnight mourning." I’ll do my best to avoid the overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.
- bananamogul 5mo ago
  This makes the recent burning of ebola clinic tents by angry relatives make more sense. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-tent-fire-congo-9.7210001 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-tent-fire-congo-9.721000...
- BJones12 5mo ago
  This is a great example of how some cultures are better than others.
SecretDreams 5mo ago
So your claim is this won't be an issue for the rest of the world? What are the underlying implications from your statement?
- christkv 5mo ago
  That it does not spread that easily and that its current spread is more a combination of factors in the specific area. War, hunger, refugees, culture and lack of education. It’s to say it’s hard for it to land and expand. Once you have symptoms the patient is also very quickly immobilized reducing the spread further.
illusive4080 5mo ago
0% chance this spreads rapidly in the first world.

arjie 5mo ago

> the US has “abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.” It’s interesting to note that in the end, there was no one else coming: we were it. A large amount of disease containment and control was just fronted by the United States. As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. It’s not that the Chinese century will have their massive industrial engine put to the tasks that America put hers to. It’s just that things won’t get done. Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.

hedora 5mo ago
I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. The US was previously the center of international collaboration for science and technology, and that took decades to establish. The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars. The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?) I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically: 1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left 2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
- pjot 5mo ago
  > The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars. Is this true? From years of watching Top Gear any Chinese car that was tested was laughably bad.

hedora 5mo ago

Like Trump 1.0’s handling of COVID, this outbreak is going to spread further and faster than it would have if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives. Those initiatives inevitably cost far less than the economic impact of outbreaks (the US is currently diverting international travelers), but the best deal maker in the history of the universe says they’re a “bad deal”, so the rest of the planet gets to suffer.

BJones12 5mo ago
> if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives There are ~197 countries in the world, you should also criticize the other 196 for also not wanting to pay for the exact same thing.
- SecretDreams 5mo ago
  Maybe there could have been direct solicitation for funds from other countries before suddenly and dramatically pulling the plug on decades of hard work?
- jeremyjh 5mo ago
  Maybe there should have been a plan. A period of notice and a transition plan. It couldn't happen, since the Trump administration does not believe in competence, only in spectacle.
  - delfinom 5mo ago
    More so none of them have actually started and ran a real successful business. Just trustfund babies who don't know how anything operates.
- thinkingtoilet 5mo ago
  I'm American. I will criticize America. If you live in another country, you work there to improve how you help the least fortunate people on the planet. I'm not going to write letters to the government of Turkmenistan. It should also be noted America is the richest country in the history of the world so expecting to do more is quite reasonable.

jmpman 5mo ago

Grok is very defensive of Elon's role in the current Ebola outbreak. However if you push on Elon impacting Ebola monitoring, it will eventually admit that Elon's DOGE cancelled "some" Ebola prevention efforts very briefly, but in reality many Ebola related contracts and programs were not fully restored. "Surveillance capacity in eastern DRC weakened, contributing to the current Bundibugyo Ebola strain circulating undetected for an estimated 6–8 weeks before confirmation."

ceejayoz 5mo ago
A while back "oops, we accidentally canceled ebola monitoring" was a White House press conference laugh line made by Musk, in fact. https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2056461616162431323 https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2056461616162431323
- mentalgear 5mo ago
  Fking Billionaire Wackos are going to be the death of all of us (while they will escape to their New Zealand underground bunkers staffed with robot servants).
e12e 5mo ago
I was curious if the basic ai chatbots behaved differently - been a while since I tried the same prompt across models..: Apparently Gemini is the late night news anchor: https://g.co/gemini/share/3504289b8dc8 https://g.co/gemini/share/3504289b8dc8 Chatgpt the art critic: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a11e80e-523c-83ea-9a1b-03329f860c03 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a11e80e-523c-83ea-9a1b-03329f860c... And grok somewhat of an apologist: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_4071d2b9-ae39-43cc-abf1-cda968c02c2e https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_4071d2b9-ae39-43cc-abf1-cd...
WarmWash 5mo ago
I understand the need for charity, and we should be doing it to support these countries. But I don't see how to logically make the connection that when you pull that charity back, you are now responsible for any crisis. That is exactly the argument that people who are against foreign aid make. Like I will help you walk and feed your dog if you can't all the time, but if I stop doing that and your dog gets sick, that's not my fault and I'm not a bad person.

iluvcommunism 5mo ago

[dead]