r/news • u/AudibleNod • 1d ago
An Ebola treatment center was burned down as the death toll in Congo passes 4,000
https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-outbreak-virus-4c79b59ec81a08675d2506c9e176d125189
u/The_Dread_Candiru 1d ago
A senior U.N. official said an Ebola-hit displacement camp housing a transit center for infected patients was burned by soldiers earlier this week as they were looking for weapons in Kigonze, on the outskirts of Bunia, forcing 19,000 people in the camp to flee.
At some point, these uber-corrupt and inept governments/regimes/clans just make helping them impossible.
76
u/hellranger788 1d ago
Yeah, alot of needlessly stupid things are happening in regard to this particular outbreak. People refusing to obey quarantine, people touching the dead bodies due to cultural stuff, and the usual craziness that comes from the various armed groups.
This will sound cold hearted, but I feel like this is an example of Darwinism. Stupid people die from shit thats entirely avoidable.
120
u/Tasty_Tumbleweed_547 1d ago
People who have not had health education can respond this way. Some people are responding out of the anger from grief, and not being allowed to follow their traditional practices. Some people are angry that all of the money is going into the country for Ebola while they starve. It is a very complicated situation. I have worked in East Congo for many years and continue to work with the people there to educate in a compassionate way that touches the head and the heart. This is the only way to help people. In the US, some people said that Covid was a hoax and people do the same in other places around the world when they don’t understand and don’t learn the information from trusted individuals
43
u/Canadiangoosedem0n 1d ago
Great response. Situations like these are never as simple as people want them to be.
2
u/Nattekat 16h ago
I think the thing where things also differ in this case is that this darwinism can apply to both individuals, small groups and entire countries. Every single country that exists and thrives at this very moment is shaped by war, conquest and dealing with crisis, quite literally a survival of the fittest. If a certain culture ritual is shaped in such a way that it promotes spread of a deadly virus, maybe it's for the better if it is destroyed one way or another.
From an emotional perspective it might sound a bit harsh, but there's really nothing else you can do about it at this very moment.
6
u/Burger_Thief 14h ago
Its not harsh, it completely lacking in empathy and borderline sociopathic. Get help.
3
11
u/hellranger788 1d ago
I don't deny I speak from a place of privilege, knowing lots of people don't have access to the stuff I take for granted. And like you mention its crazy we got people in first world countries that thought covid was a hoax and the vaccines are bad, so even more developed places suffer, and ironically enough we tend to suffer because we CHOOSE to suffer, while places in Africa suffer by no fault of their own (except for the horrifically corrupt and violent). The situation IS complicated and it would be impossible to list all the various factors that is causing this, but its like fire meeting more fire meeting gas in this regard.
Humans, even with everything we have created, are still vulnerable to the cruel laws of nature's "survival of the fittest".
2
u/Tasty_Tumbleweed_547 4h ago
During Covid, my friends in Africa could not believe that people here were not getting vaccinated. They had nothing.
3
u/Tasty_Tumbleweed_547 4h ago
I have traveled throughout the Congo and have many friends there. I am working with them to educate others. We have developed animations in local languages that I had never heard of by working with my friends and their friends to translate and do voiceovers. A lot of people are illiterate and cannot understand things that other organizations print. It is incredibly important to work with religious groups there because they carry more trust than the government and outsiders ever can. Some of the places that I used to travel are now run by M 23 rebels. Outside organizations don’t really wanna go there so the only hope is for insiders to teach people about prevention and why it is important to protect themselves against touching the dead. Our ancestors in the US used to prepare bodies as well before the funeral industry took over.
2
u/Tasty_Tumbleweed_547 4h ago
I worked with them to put the soundtracks on radio stations in the areas that are affected and are at risk. It is incredibly inexpensive to do this. I have run out of money to keep it going, but I keep begging friends and others to give so that this can continue. If you ever went there, you would understand the complexities and understand the beautiful spirits that live there.
4
u/unclesam_0001 12h ago
And we all saw how much sympathy and empathy the COVID deniers in the US received, specifically on this website 🤣 you can't have it both ways, you must condemn idiots universally, otherwise you're giving right wingers completely avoidable ammo via blind empathy.
-27
u/Zubon102 1d ago
This is not Darwinism. It's entirely people acting according to their culture and their particular circumstances in life.
31
u/The_Dread_Candiru 1d ago
Inappropriate behaviors unable to adapt to environmental conditions, leading to declining survival rates, is...like... textbook natural selection.
-11
u/Zubon102 1d ago
Darwinism only deals with the genome. Cultural behaviors and dangerous actions are not due to individual genes.
24
u/hellranger788 1d ago
I’m fairly confident it is. Practicing traditional methods and cultures is one thing (touching the bodies of the deceased), but if a new variable appears (Ebola) and you don’t adapt, causing death, that’s natural selection. Adapt or die.
2
u/sowhat4 12h ago
And, if refusing to adapt to reality instead of blindly following their 'culture' results in a lot of deaths, that leads to lower reproductive success which is, in essence, Darwinism. Better educated people will tend to live and thus reproduce more successfully.
There's a reason the cultural/religious Shakers didn't grow and spread their creed all through America; they were bound to a vow of celibacy. Again, Darwinism spread through culture.
-2
u/Zubon102 12h ago
That's incorrect. Obedience or disobedience of rules is not a hereditable trait.
You are confusing biological evolution with cultural evolution.
188
u/solomons-mom 1d ago
DRC population (formerly Zaire, some estimated)
1960: 15.3 million
1980: 26.7 million
2000: 50.5 million
2026: 117.1 million
Median age: 15.9 - 16.9 years There is a lot of youthful energy in the DRC available for protests and riots.
(If the US had experienced that rate population increase, the population would be 1.4 billion people.)
56
u/MalakithAlamahdi 15h ago
That amount of population growth really doesn't seem sustainable
44
u/MrTakeAHikePal 13h ago
Its not. It will either end in a mass casualty event or mass migration. Industrialization and globalism enabled places like Africa to have massive population growth. A massive amount of their food comes from other countries. Once there is a disruption in the food or fuel supply lines (lets say a prolonged drought) then the death toll could hit the tens of millions.
-8
u/solomons-mom 13h ago
Migration is not the right word for large numbers of mobilizing young men, and for cultural reasons, the mobile would be largely men.
8
u/KDR_11k 6h ago
Why is migration not the right term for a bunch of people moving? Humans have been migrating for millenia.
-8
u/solomons-mom 6h ago edited 6h ago
I did not write "people." I specified young men. Pew Research reported that of the 1.3 million immigrants who surged into Europe in 2015, 74% were men, and 42% were young men ages 18-34. This is how it always has been -- young men set out to improve their lot in life.
When young men come en masse it is usually called an invasion. Even when it is not a military action it does create issues because masses do not have any pressing need to assimilate when they can just take over some areas instead.
5
u/KDR_11k 3h ago
No, it's an invasion when it's a hostile act, not people looking for work. When the US military sends planes to kill people in Iran, that's an invasion. When the US military sends special forces to Venezuela and kidnaps their dictator that's an invasion.
All this "military age males" bullshit is just trying to manufacture consent for murder.
3
u/AdCreepy5165 8h ago
Image doubling your population every two decades. Ouch, even an over heated economy desperate for workers couldn't absorb that. That is a lot of fucking going on.
3
u/flying_shadow 8h ago
People used to say the same thing about East Asia and Latin America, but urbanization did its usual thing and birthrates cratered. Most countries in sub-Saharan Africa now have birthrates that are noticeably lower than the natural human TFR, and this despite them still mostly being agrarian societies.
2
u/solomons-mom 6h ago
Not true. Sub Saharan birth rates are still 4+ per woman. DRC is estimated to have 5.98 to 6.05 children born per woman.
12
27
3
u/Superb_Preference368 5h ago
It’s the same anti-science sentiment we have here in America with the American public.
Soon Americans will be witch hunting their doctors and nurses.
Ignorance is the biggest threat to mankind.
-4
-63
1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
51
u/Lieutenant_Seagull 1d ago
have you ever considered that if you were, by chance, born over there, then you'd be one of them?
27
u/MarcelHanibal 1d ago
That question unfortunately won't work for people commenting like that since they're lacking any form of empathy in the first place
-23
1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
24
u/Canadiangoosedem0n 1d ago
It was soldiers looking for weapons of their enemies. Don't blame the people who needsd help for it.
9
u/_carzard_ 22h ago
The treatment center was burned down by soldier is looking for weapons. It literally says it in the first paragraph of the article if you even bother to click on it, but of course you would rather just spew hate
4
-14
-39
u/No_Cucumber3978 1d ago
Kiefer Sutherland's dad and Morgan Freeman need to have their emails scanned.
620
u/whowhodillybar 1d ago
“Some of the workers haven’t been paid for August and September, said Biongi Beiza, one of the protesters in Bunia, Ituri’s capital. “There is no explanation from the administration,” he said.”
Yeah, that’s not good.