The Stupid – It Hurts!

After someone mischievously suggested yesterday that Retreat Day Hospital in Cape Town was on lockdown due to a suspected Ebola case (it wasn’t), this “brilliant” idea is doing the rounds in Nigeria right now:

VERY URGENT PLS. INFORMATION IS GOING ROUND FROM TRUSTED SOURCES THAT EVERY ONE IS TO POUR SALT IN WARM WATER AND USE IT TO BATH BEFORE DAY BREAK THIS MORNING AS EBOLA VACCINE.

That’ll work. And it does raise the question as to why America is not sharing its salt and warm water reserves.

So what are these trusted sources?
Well, you have to look no further than the very next paragraph to er… not find out:

I don’t even know the origin but every call I’m receiving now points to that. Since salty water is not harmful to skin I think it’s just better we do it.

Have you tried sticking sweetcorn in your ears? I only ask because that’s not harmful to skin either and will have absolutely no effect on Ebola infection either?

UPDATE: WHO tweet

Interesting that they’re not taking the sweetcorn angle on this.

Cause of Ebola in Liberia “is homosexualism”

All those nonsensical theories about fruit bat reservoirs and under-cooked bush meat can finally be put aside, because some very important men in Liberia have met and revealed that the reason that Liberia has been stuck by the well-documented viral outbreak is:

That God is angry with Liberia, and that Ebola is a plague. Liberians have to pray and seek God’s forgiveness over the corruption and immoral acts (such as homosexualism, etc.) that continue to penetrate our society.

I need to point out right now that firstly, I realise that ‘homosexualism’ isn’t actually a word, and that secondly, I was not responsible for the use of the word ‘penetrate’ soon after ‘homosexualism’.
STOP SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!

But how can this be?
West African homosexualism is impossible! Lest we forget – it’s been proven with Nigerian magnets!

Anyway, the very important men were, as you may have guessed from their initial statement:

…more than 100 Bishops, Pastors, General Overseers, Prophets, Evangelists and other Ministers of the Gospel.

comprising of (but not limited to):

…mainstream church leaders such as Archbishop of the Catholic Church of Liberia, Lewis Zeiglier, first vice president of the Liberian Council of Churches, Rt. Reverend Dr. Kortu Brown, as well as representatives of other Christian associations with whom the LCC collaborated in organizing the meeting.

“But,” I hear you asking, “were The Pentecostal Fellowship Union of Liberia, Liberia Fellowship of Full Gospel Ministers, Association of Evangelicals of Liberia, Prophetic Call to Ministers, Christian Community in Liberia and the Apostolic World Christian Fellowship also represented?”

Well, let me put your mind at rest with this quote:

The Pentecostal Fellowship Union of Liberia, Liberia Fellowship of Full Gospel Ministers, Association of Evangelicals of Liberia, Prophetic Call to Ministers, Christian Community in Liberia, Apostolic World Christian Fellowship were all represented.

So – in short – yes. Yes, they were.

But now, finding the cause of the outbreak is surely only half the issue. What are we going to do about sorting it out, now that it’s already happening? No worries, they’ve got that sorted too:

That a three-day indoor fast and prayer across the nation be observed, commencing next Wednesday, August 6th, and concluding Friday, August 8th.

Maybe they also advised people to use hand sanitiser, to not hug corpses and to go and see a doctor promptly if they felt sick?
Well, no, they didn’t, but they did apparently suggest that people: “knock on the door of God”.

To be fair to the Big Man Upstairs, I would completely understand if He chose not to answer; after all, as we have all heard, homosexualism and Ebola are apparently rife in Liberia.

Ebola in Nigeria

Spotted on twitter – the Nigerian Police Force sharing this leaflet in Pidgin telling people what to look out for and what to do in cases of Ebola:

ebpid

This is a great example of the importance of pitching information at the right level and in the right language or dialect if you are going to get your message successfully across. This leaflet has also been made available in Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba.
Too many otherwise brilliantly thought-out campaigns have failed because these basic rules were forgotten during implementation.

As for Pidgin language – I’m blown away every time I see or hear it.

Ebola: anti-hysteria

Following my description of Ebola as a “Superstar Disease“, microbiologistic people all over the world are queuing up to agree with me:

Indeed. And then there was sciencey author and journalist Maryn McKenna, who was lured out of her temporary hermit status (she’s busy writing a book and doesn’t have time for all this real life stuff) by the Ebola hyperbole, noise and nonsense:

The Ebola outbreak has been building in West Africa for a while, but when it was revealed at the end of last week that two American aid workers had caught the disease — and that they were being transported back to the US for treatment — the news and the reaction to it instantly filled every channel. Over the weekend, so much misinformation and outrage got pumped out that it feels as though there’s no way to cut through the noise.

McKenna’s reaction was to compile a compilation of sensible reactions, columns and opinion pieces on Ebola for Wired.

That I am anti-Ebola panic — and especially anti-Ebola media scrum, which was disgraceful — does not mean I am not concerned about Ebola where it is authentically a problem, which is in the expanding epidemic in West Africa. It is a dreadful outbreak, it needs attention, and it says something ugly about us as a society that we only really noticed it when two Westerners were injured by it. But, again: The conditions that are pushing that epidemic along do not exist in the US.

To be fair, I think that the world (although perhaps not the USA) was concerned about Ebola and the Daily Mail had begun with its scare stories before these two aid workers were repatriated for treatment. Maybe it’s because we’re on the same continent or maybe it’s because the US remains entirely US-centric that here in SA, we’re somehow more aware about the Ebola outbreak and have been for a while.
So yes, same continent, but Africa is big: Sierra Leone’s Freetown is closer to Miami than it is to Cape Town. But then we’re all just a flight or two away anyway.

If I worked for the CDC (albeit that they’re not always 100% perfect) or any of the organisations involved with the transport or treatment of the two Americans in Atlanta, I’d actually be rather offended that people thought I’d be so sloppy at my job or poorly-trained enough to pose a danger to people in the surrounding area. It’s not like I go up to local scaffolders and suggest that their scaffolding isn’t safe. Well, not often, anyway.

Before you get carried along with the hype, you’d do well to go and have a read of some of the stuff McKenna links to; my favourite being this one.

Besides Ebola…

While there is a (rightfully) well-publicised Ebola outbreak taking place in West Africa, it doesn’t mean that the usual suspects of the infectious diseases world have gone away. And while the world’s attention is focused on that pesky haemorrhagic fever virus, cholera has been going about its usual business in Nigeria, Ghana and South Sudan.
It’s a reminder that while the “superstar diseases” are widely and enthusiastically reported by the First World’s sensationalist media (like the bubonic plague case (singular) in China that I mentioned last week), the more mundane stuff continues, but goes very much under the radar.

Cholera is unpleasant, acute and life-threatening, especially in children. It’s also fairly simple to prevent, assuming that you can get access to clean water:

“It is the filth everywhere and the lack of hygiene among our people,” the Deputy Director of Health for the Greater Accra Region, Dr John Eleaza said, noting that some patients have been victims of the disease despite using pipe-borne water.
Unfortunately we have some of our pipelines going through some of these drains…some of them are broken” he said.
He is advising Ghanaians to be careful and practise proper hygiene to prevent a deterioration of the outbreak.

And while the mortality rate doesn’t rival that of Ebola, the sheer numbers affected mean that the death toll in these outbreaks is already rapidly approaching (if not exceeding) that of their more famous cousin up the road.

Even the local media is more concerned with the Ebola outbreak than that of cholera, as this story in Nigeria’s Vanguard demonstrates, with nearly half the piece being hijacked by Ebola news, including this spectacular advice from State Commissioner for Health Dr. Joe Akabike:

…avoid touching corpses of victims of the disease and to avoid sexual intercourse with patients of the disease until after three months of their recovery in order not to contact the disease.

He doesn’t mention avoiding sexual intercourse with the corpses, but I suppose that’s just considered common sense.
And common decency.

I digress. All I wanted to remind people is that the Ebola outbreak should be considered an additional problem, and not suddenly the only problem in sub-Saharan Africa.