Weaponisation of Ebola by Muslim terrorists

[Fidel_Castronaut]

I think the above is overly parsimonious and misses out some salient points about both the nature of infection contraction and control and the socio-demographic reality of West Africa.

I don't think one can apportion blame to people who get infected with Ebola is many cases. It's contracted, we think, by eating bats as bush meat. Poorer societies tend to rely on the eating of bushmeat to survive if produced foods are hard to come by or are too expensive. Education about the dangers of Ebola is certainly lacking, but we can't blame someone for contracting a disease from someone who didn't even know they were infected. If you sat in front of me and presented symptoms that looked indistinguishable from a, say, a fever, then without the education and resources to do further testing I'd probably never know (until it was too late).

It's not enough to simply 'ban' a food source that communities rely on, otherwise instead of an ebola infection you'd have a famine. You're trading one issue with another. No, there are better ways, and it comes with socio-economic empowerment over the long-term. The only way you can counter cynicism over methods of infection control and the dangers that a virus like Ebola presents is through educating people who are most susceptible to it.

Is this an easy road? No. Will it be effective in the short term? Probably not. But if one thing is guaranteed to have an effect it's the 80% mortality rate that some areas of West Africa are facing with the current Ebola epidemic (which is what it is). Like it or not, aid is an important element of this process towards greater self-determination but I agree, in part, that a lot of aid is used ineffectively.

The issue with Ebola is that it crosses continents. To simply leave the various West African states to their own devices means we will see an outbreak in Europe and the US on a much greater scale that we already have. This relates to my point about unfounded cynicism over Ebola and its treatment/containing from folks in Western countries who want to decry it is an 'African' problem (and I'm pointing no fingers here). It's far from it. Hindering attempts to contain and ultimately one day cure it now will leave many more thousands in their graves tomorrow.

And I'd like to see some evidence backing up how the very miniscule (relative) amounts of aid given to African states is correlated to population growth before I comment on that. Populations boom for many reasons but one key element is poverty and destitution, which is rife in many parts of Central Africa. I would also like to posit that we take far, far more out of the African continent than we put in, financially speaking.