Here is what my friend related to me about respiratory troubles in Africa. There is a class of poachers, or claim-jumpers as it were, who illegally glean from

Here is what my friend related to me about respiratory troubles in Africa. There is a class of poachers, or claim-jumpers as it were, who illegally glean from mines. They do this primarily by scraping and abrading the walls and gleaning the powder or dust that comes off into ores. Now since this is illegal activity, it's done on the downlow, and obviously it's done by quite poor people without sufficient PPE. So they don't go in there with respirators and masks and HEPA filters. They may have a cloth over their mouth as they scrape over the walls and kick up an underground storm of dust in the dimly lit caverns. So of course, this dust contains hazardous materials, especially arsenic and other nasty stuff. And the gleaners tend to come down with respiratory ailments. You'd get a chronic cough, shortness of breath, sore throat, and ultimately, coughing up blood. You'd be prone to secondary respiratory infections along the way. Now if you're a poacher and you get seen in a hospital or clinic, you won't admit that you're conducting illicit activities in mines. That would be rather foolish to out yourself. So you lie to the physicians, and you don't really know how your lungs got this way: must be voodoo, or a witch doctor or curse or something. So it seems that a lot of allegedly Ebola cases get assigned to these poachers who won't admit that they inhaled arsenic, basically, chronically over the years they've been sneaking into mines at night. But the Ebola bugaboo is powerful, and ubiquitous, and easy to diagnose at arm's length, so basically anyone who comes in presenting with respiratory distress, they're going to pin Ebola on them without a second thought. I don't know if the foregoing is plausible or true, but I'm just saying, it's not far-fetched based on what I know of medicine the way it is in 2026, and it sure would be a shame if a whole region is getting it all wrong because large gangs of thieves won't own up to their own wrongdoings.