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- Hacker News
- I get the feeling the reason this is out of control is the political climate, at one point in time, a good US president or EU council would've sent aid, doctors, equipment, etc to help tackle this, now everyone is so broke (allegedly) and angry that it's just political suicide to say you're sending money to help "foreigners" in Africa.
The face of rich people and philanthropy has changed too. The billionaires (and nearly trillionaires?) don't need to pretend to care anymore. They have a moat right now where it's fine to be hoarding all the money while thousands die from something which we could stop if the resources and political clout was available to help.
China was entering into this space but seems not to be helping now either, I guess because the west isn't helping, they don't need to pretend anymore that they're the good guys.
Obviously, it's the right thing to do is help, even if just for selfish reasons, ie we don't want this thing in other countries, but you cannot do that anymore because it's just political suicide to do so.
- How many decades have we been helping Africa for, and for what?by fliglr
- For those that don't recall or weren't around the Obama administration send thousands of medical and military to assist with the 2013-2016 outbreak. A big part of what they did was construct medical wards, but they helped with treatment, PPE, testing infrastructure, etc.
That outbreak had 11K dead and things were on the verge of being a lot worse. There were beginning to be neighborhood level lockdowns to prevent spread and civil unrest. Its difficult to play what-if games but it certainly was a very serious situation.
From what I've heard this outbreak is spreading faster than that one at the same stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_epidemic
by thinkcontext - I chide the people in Africa for not following up on best health practices as far as Ebola victims are concerned. It seems there's a ritualistic need for people in Africa to touch and kiss the deceased before they're buried. This is a bad idea as far as Ebola is concerned. There've even been cases where family members attacked UN hospitals to remove their loved ones remains, perpetuating the spread of the disease.
A couple hundred years ago they didn't know any better so you could forgive them. But these days we do know better and to still insist on rituals that lead to the spreading of Ebola is just plain dumb.
As far as I'm concerned there should be stronger travel restrictions for people from Africa, especially the ones near the Ebola outbreak.
by hn_submit - >I chide the people in Africa for not following up on best health practices as far as Ebola victims are concerned
God, how can you say that with a straight face after the "ritualistic" response people in the West had during COVID? Fighting against wearing masks, having their mind break because they couldn't go drink in bars, going crazy for snake oil solutions and destroying public health care.
We have had in almost every western country politicians and executives asking to lift any restrictions "because we all die one day anyway, we shouldn't be afraid, get back to work".
by Arodex - > But these days we do know better and to still insist on rituals that lead to the spreading ...
Thus explaining why RFK has his current position.
by ds_opseeker - People on the street, so to speak, don't know better even in advanced nations with strong educational systems. Look how much rejection of vaccination there is in spite of "knowing better". In many African nations there is very reasonable suspicion of European authorities - as there is a long history of abuse and degradation that has moreover been weaponized politically kn the post colonial era. The solution is trustworthy and pedagogical people on the ground doing a lot of hard work and that requires lots of institutional support.by contubernio
- 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.
- Today 300 died from ebola in Congo according to news reports.by ncr100
- The documentary on the last outbreak remain relevant to this day, the causes are still local hygiene practices, and this will not be solved by dropping in medical teams and hospitals and the WHO holding conferences and getting more money.
What solved this last time was the local population learning the importance of washing ones hands
by 4g - There's a Bayesian forecast from some folks at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that's useful to see if the outbreak has reached peak size: https://epiforecasts.io/BVDOutbreakSize/stable/analysis#Summ...
The last update finally had a growth rate confidence interval straggling 0, meaning the peak seems to be within reach: "The latest growth rate is estimated to be 30% -0.005–0.008"
There's a nice figure showing Rt over time: https://epiforecasts.io/BVDOutbreakSize/stable/analysis#Repr...
by croemer - Newest run from 2026-08-25 shows Rt likely above 1 again unfortunately (percentages are confidence intervals): 30% 1.05–1.19, 60% 0.99–1.31, 90% 0.82–1.6. Daily growth rate: 30% 0.005–0.014, 60% -0.001–0.021, 90% -0.013–0.034 per day.by croemer
- (Originally posted as a reply to a dead comment)
While there was some controversy regarding how COVID spreads in the early days (droplets vs aerosol, how many virions you needed to be exposed to to become infected, whether asymptomatic transmission was possible, etc.), most of the details were fairly well understood within a year after the pandemic started. Plus, we were already aware that coronaviruses are capable of spreading via the air and causing mass outbreaks [0], so even at the very beginning I doubt that many experts would have claimed that it was impossible for COVID-19 to cause a pandemic.
However, Ebola has been around for 50 years now [1], so we have a pretty good idea how it works. And every source that I've read says that it spreads exclusively through direct fluid contact with someone who is symptomatic [2] [3] [4] [5], and so does every other virus in the same family [6], so it seems almost impossible for Ebola to cause the same type of worldwide outbreak that COVID-19 did.
(I'm not claiming that Ebola will never spread to North America/Europe, or that an outbreak won't spread to and kill lots of people in Africa, just that it should spread much slower than COVID-19 and that it should be much easier to prevent its transmission.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#History
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/causes/index.html#heading-xkphh2xy...
[3]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ebola-disea...
[4]: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2026/05/18/what-is-ebola-and-how-d...
[5]: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/ebo...
- Viral transmission.... Can change........by AtlasBarfed
- Before COVID, I had thought that bushmeat [1] could be the route that spread Ebola to Europe, people smuggle it in their luggage.by rjsw
- One big risk with Ebola is how the dead are handled in some parts of Africa. I understand the dead are cared for at home by family members which increases the risk of exposure. In western countries, death care is far more formalized with exposure protections, so Ebola is much less likely to spread as it does in other countries without that formalized care.
- True right now, but what happens if it mutates?
A few thousand is nowhere close to pandemic but it's enough to give the virus many opportunities to evolve against its new environment.
On the plus side, most viruses become less deadly as they adapt to their host. COVID luckily did this, it seems. If Ebola does this it'll become like the flu, but we don't want yet another flu-level disease circulating.
by api - Ebola is known for 50 years, and yet we still discover new facts about it, thanks to PCR and genetic analysis.
It was only in 2021 that we discovered that ebola can remain dormant for years in former patients and restart infecting:
by Arodex - The caveats to your comment are in my opinion as follows: Bundibugyo the current strain has not previously been responsible for material outbreaks, as such it has therefore received significantly less scientific attention.
Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811, the CDC and associated institutions resolutely claim this is not possible, yet also insist on full respirator PPE. For any institution to claim we know much about this strain isnt true. An alarming fact to update ones prior is the current size of the outbreak and its rapid development compared to ALL previous outbreaks (yes conditions on the ground maybe confounding this), but the scientific approach would be to say, we simply do not have enough evidence to make any claims of significance.
I am quite worried about the potential for this situation in the DRC (a country of ~116m people, ~55% rural) to 1) not burn itself out, 2) act as a smouldering viral reservoir where occasional spillovers occur to the western hemisphere.
2) Is interesting politically for Western countries, because even if a mass pandemic DOES NOT occur (this is my base case), the pressure of containing a handful of regularly appearing and likely high profile Ebola cases by public health authorities will be acutely felt politically and socially. It is very possible some sorts of lockdowns are implemented. Yes vaccines are in development, yes rapid antigen testing is possible. But this is no Covid, 50%+ CFR is a totally different beast! I think this is potentially close to some sort of worst case scenario from a social and political perspective even if the public health impact IS limited.
by phyalow - Note to self and others who have read Richard Preston's "Hot Zone": The 1989 Reston (US) incident was NOT caused by a single-base mutation of Ebola, but by a distinct monkey virus. Preston seems to have made that up to dramatize events.by mppm
- No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic. The concern here is the very high mortality rate. Granted the transmission rate is low, but in countries where facilities and health-care workers are scarce this disease is still capable of being a real problem.by biorach