Episode 37 Ebola - Not a Good Way to Die.

Bleeding out of your eyeballs.  Your internal organs turning to mush.  Ebola is not a pretty way to go, and the threat to America and the world is very real.  We'll talk bioterror today on the Hot Zone.

 

Hello everyone.  It just struck me that there was a great novel I read years ago about an ebola outbreak in the United States.  It's the kind of fiction that keeps you up late at night and makes you shudder to think about the possibility of a pandemic by an incurable virus like Ebola.  That novel, as it happens, was called "the Hot Zone."  Heh.

 

In some parts of Africa today, that fiction is now a reality.  In the Democratic Republic of Congo, there have been more than 600 cases reported of the Ebola virus, and the mortality rate is over fifty percent - a nightmare scenario in a country with poor infrastructure and more than 85 million people.  I visited the DRC ten years ago, and let me show you what it looks like, just to give you an idea of the scope of the problem.

 

Well all the optimism that was shown ten years ago has kind of evaporated, and there have been sporadic outbreaks of fighting in that area ever since.

 

Presidential elections were held in the DRC on December 30, to elect a replacement for Joseph Kabila, who had held the office since 2001.  There hasn't been an orderly transfer of power in Congo since 1960, and it looks like this one won't be much different.

 

All this instability and violence is causing people to flee from the DRC in record numbers into neighboring countries.  Add to that the second largest outbreak of the Ebola virus in history - and you have the potential makings of a pandemic that could kill millions.

 

A new U.S. Embassy security alert is telling US citizens in that country to get out.  Now.  Leave with all haste.  It says to expect violence to break out once the results of the election are announced - there have been so many irregularities in this election process that basically nobody will trust the outcome no matter who wins.

 

Well the other day I just so happened to meet one of the foremost experts on Ebola on the planet, a Microbiologist who has been instrumental in developing a vaccine for Ebola which has been used on more than sixty thousand people in Congo in the last year in an attempt to stop the transmission of the virus.

 

[Ellen Jo Baron interview]

 

Estimates are that there are over 4 million internally displaced people inside Congo who have fled the violence there, and last year more than 1.7 million refugees, which puts the scale of this disaster on par with Syria or Yemen.  But the rapidly growing number of Ebola cases being reported there only makes things much much worse.  

 

The Trump administration announced January 2nd that it was sending a contingent of 80 US troops to neighboring Gabon, to serve as a quick reaction force to evacuate people from the US embassy in Kinshasa if the violence begins to threaten US citizens there.   

 

The Centers for Disease Control have been interfacing with the US military to be ready to respond to these kinds of disasters rapidly and efficiently.  Captain Joel Montgomery is part of the US Public Health Service, which most people don't know is a uniformed but not military branch of the federal government.

 

[Cpt Joel Montgomey SOT]

 

The situation in the DRC is a serious crisis.  People are dying and lots more are likely to die, and that's even if Ebola doesn't spread across Africa and around the world.  Praying for those people would be a really great idea, and if I can work it out to get over there sometime in the next couple of months, I will.  

 

That's all we have for this special edition of the hot zone.  I am trying to bring you quality news in a whole new way, and today's interview proves we can deliver.  So I hope you'll go to Patreon.com/hotzone and subscribe for as little as three bucks a month - and I'll take those funds with me around the world and let you help people in their hour of need.  Thanks for being a part of helping me not just make the news, but make the news good.

 

I'm Chuck Holton, and this is the Hot Zone.