The good news is that MSF and WHO have flooded the affected area with workers, treatment centers, and money, and have over 7500 doses of Merck's experimental but promising Ebola vaccine on hand, and the outbreak, like many before, is mainly in a section of one province that's remote rainforest jungle area (which helps check the spread, but also hinders efforts to combat the outbreak).
The bad news is that in the last month, it's gone from 21 cases, and 17 deaths, with 75 contacts being tracked, to currently 54 cases with 25 deaths, and now tracking over 900 contacts, so its r-naught is proceeding almost exactly apace with doubling every 21 days.
We're still only at a 6 out of 33 on the pandemic panic meter, and it hasn't escaped Congo.
Yet.
So it's still small potatoes. Let's hope it peters out, and stays that way.
You can view the details on the relevant Wikipedia page.
Hopefully they nip this thing early and small, before, in the phrase knowingly and memorably quoted by African expat sages like Kim DuToit, "Africa Wins Again".
Barring it showing up in someplace like Kinshasa, Cairo, or Capetown, (let alone and God forbid Paris, London, or Rio de Janeiro), I hope not to have to re-visit this next month.
5 comments:
I REALLY appreciate these updates. Got people I care about on the continent at the moment - and will for some months to come.
Term used by one of them; "Africomplicated"
Boat Guy
If you haven't read it already, hit the link in the article to Kim DuToit in the post.
An extracted American by way of South Africa, it hot-links to a re-post of his 2002 essay "Let Africa Sink", on his current site.
You will learn more about Africa from AD1500-five minutes ago in that single essay that you would from reading all the area studies extant on the Dark Continent.
As he noted his essay was "pre-AIDS". The man knows of what he writes.
My own recent reading has been "African Kaiser" about von Lettow Vorbeck and his successful campaign in WWI. Quite a story.
I "worked" Africa for some years as a staff officer but only managed to get to Botswana which my 3rd Group brothers assured me was/is "not Africa"
BG
FBI agent shot a bar patron after doing a backflip and losing gun: https://www.denverpost.com/2018/06/02/fbi-mile-high-spirits-shooting/
If they weren't doing stupid sh*t, they wouldn't be nicknamed Far Beyond Insanity.
I had one as a psych eval patient once, after she'd mentioned to her also-an-agent husband she'd kill herself if he filed for a divorce, and given he gun-toting status, the local constables brought her in on a 72-hour hold.
I think it would do that agency a world of good if they'd close Quantico and move their academy to any of several now-vacant mil bases around Monterey, CA, or anywhere in Florida, or somewhere in Colorado. A more laid-back training environment couldn't help but get them off on a better foot. Those folks are wrapped too tight and none too bright, which is never a great combination.
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