Residents of a town at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo attacked and burned part of a health center where people are being treated for the virus, and 18 people suspected of infection left the facility, a local hospital director said Saturday. It was the second such attack in the region in a week.
Unidentified people arrived at the clinic in Mongbwalu on Friday night and set fire to a tent set up for suspected and confirmed Ebola cases by the Doctors Without Borders humanitarian group, Dr. Richard Lokudi, director of the Mongbwalu General Reference Hospital, told The Associated Press.
This is a compelling story; sources?
I had immunocompromised family members. Back when covid hit, I spent about a year and a half mostly housebound - I couldn’t risk bringing something home. One of the things I did was to obsessively listen to a podcast called This Week In Virology; I even went back and listened to most of the 500+ episodes that they had already produced at the time. They had episodes where they talked about various aspects of ebola - how it’s spread, what the symptoms are, why some people can have such extremely paranoid and (to us) illogical reactions to the people who came in to treat the potentially infected, etc.
I remember someone explaining why some medical people had been murdered because of local distrust of the authorities; it didn’t make much sense to me at the time, but having seen how insane some of my own countrypeople got during covid, I don’t really have room to comment. I can’t point you to a specific episode, and I’m not going to re-listen to try to find it (each episode is 90-120 minutes), but it almost certainly was one of the ones tagged with ebola. I think it was one of the episodes with Alan Dove, though that doesn’t narrow it down much; and I think it probably wasn’t one of the Clinical Update episodes, which is probably more helpful.