THERE is an ongoing ebola epidemic in Congo, and it could potentially spread to neighboring Uganda and other African countries.
This outbreak has been ongoing for quite some time but experts believe that it may be uncontainable. Here’s a brief report from healthmap.org:
“As of Sept. 24, 2018 11 cities have reported cases of Ebola, including Masereka, Kalunguta, Beni, Butembo, Goma, Oicha, Mabalako and Musienene in North Kivu, and Mandima, Komanda and Tchomia in Ituri. There have been 119 confirmed cases of Ebola in the North Kivu and Ituri provinces along the Ugandan border, 69 of which have died from the infectious disease (3). Simultaneously, there are 31 probable cases and 9 suspected cases, of which 31 have died (3). Promisingly, there have been 41 cases of Ebola that have been cured (3). Most Ebola cases have been reported in Mabalako, where there have been 69 confirmed cases and 44 confirmed deaths (3).”
But such illnesses are not exclusive to Africa or even the developing world. Thanks to migration and globalization, diseases previously thought to be exclusive to certain parts of the world have spread to Western countries. In the UK, for example, authorities recently reported the outbreak of the Monkey Pox Virus, which is native to Africa.
One of the most important things that people in the modern world take for granted is good health care and protection from viral outbreaks. In the past, plagues happened all the time, and for the most part, people could do nothing about it. People got sick and then they died.
With modern medicine, better nutrition and improved infrastructure, plagues have disappeared. But have they really?
The Spanish Flu, the Black Death and the Third Pandemic are some of the most well-known examples of such plagues, but there were plenty of other examples throughout history, and they devastated human populations that were still largely agrarian and decentralized. Imagine what a modern-day plague could do to a tightly packed major metropolitan area.
Not pretty.
Viruses adapt and mutate all the time, and based on the news, it’s possible that there are new viral strains out there, waiting to spread to major cities and urban areas. Although such viruses can be treated more efficiently thanks to modern medicine, modern societies are also more vulnerable to them. Urbanization and easy travel allows viruses to spread quickly. Moreover, modern sensibilities make it difficult to quarantine cases of viral outbreaks, particularly in less developed and chaotic areas of the world.
Imagine what social media would be like in the middle of a major viral outbreak.
Why this talk about plagues and diseases on a foreign news column? Because healthcare and sanitation play a big role in international politics, particularly in those countries that can’t afford them, like the Philippines for example. As third world demographics increase (third world countries skew favorably towards the youth), so too does the burden of providing third world countries with adequate sanitation and health, but based on the news being released lately, there’s not enough of those to go around.
And if this is the case then it’s very possible that plagues – like the kind that afflicted pre-modern societies – will make a comeback in the coming years, simply because the developing world is demographically growing too fast, while the developed world is either demographically stagnant or shrinking. Based on the data and news articles, I’m rather pessimistic about the future of global viral containment. Not only are developing countries incapable of preventing viral outbreaks on their own, plagues are the historical average for most human societies.
When examined from an historical perspective, our relatively clean, sanitized and disease free societies are the outliers, not the norms. Hope you take your vitamins./PN
