Recently, there has been news of Ebola outbreaks in the town of Bikoro in Northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo. This current outbreak began back in August, 2018, and over 1000 people have been infected making it the second largest outbreak of the virus ever recorded. Over 600 people have died from this outbreak, with the number continuing to rise. According to the BBC, “Election officials cited the Ebola outbreak as a reason to cancel the December presidential elections in the affected regions.” The fact that they even cancelled the presidential elections just due to an ebola outbreak shows how bad this virus actually is. There are five identified strains of the Ebola virus, the deadliest to date being the Zaire strain. This Zaire strain is the one of the current outbreak, which they have fortunately have just created a vaccine for. However, this when combined with the fact that the outbreak is in the town of Bikoro, which is a large trade town, gives this outbreak the potential to be the worst one yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the BBC, over a quarter of the people in affected areas do not actually believe that the disease exists, with another 36% of people saying that the disease was concocted to destabilize the country. This general distrust has greatly prolonged the effort to rid the areas of the virus. This distrust has led to four violent attacks on Ebola treatment centers. Patrick Vinck, from Harvard Medical School, “people don’t trust the authorities due to decades of conflict and this has an impact on the disease spreading.” This overall situation of this current outbreak really combines to make a perfect recipe for chaos, however I feel as if the virus will be contained and won’t be as bad as the 2014-2016 epidemic. The previous outbreak in 2014 was the worst ebola outbreak recorded and it is unlikely this virus will be as bad, especially with all the containment effort provided by various countries and NGO’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently, there has been news of Ebola outbreaks in the town of Bikoro in Northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo. This current outbreak began back in August, 2018, and over 1000 people have been infected making it the second largest outbreak of the virus ever recorded. Over 600 people have died from this outbreak, with the number continuing to rise. According… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3563,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540\/revisions\/3563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}