Gateway to Hell: The Threat of Ebola Grows Worse

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-ebola-outbreak-in-africa-could-become-a-threat-to-europe-a-990445.html



With Ebola spreading rapidly in Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, international organizations fear the number of infections could exceed 20,000. Experts are calling for the industrialized world to do more to help stop the virus.

Gateway to Hell: The Threat of Ebola Grows Worse
By Katrin Elger, Veronika Hackenbroch, Horand Knaup, Gordon Repinski and Samiha Shafy
September 08, 2014 – 06:21 PM

Kalashnikovs cost as little as $100 in Port Harcourt, says Helmut Lux, an orthopedist and trauma surgeon from the city of Neckarsulm, Germany. The machine gun is said to be the favorite weapon of gangs in the Nigerian city. And they are used in street fights almost every day. "If 100 people start firing at each other," Lux says, "around 10 die and five wind up on the operating table."

Lux came to the port city in oil-rich southern Nigeria two years ago and worked for the aid organization Doctors without Borders. He quickly learned that an AK-47 can rip large holes in a person's body.

Lux conducted operations day and night until overuse resulted in an inflamed tendon in his hand. "Without us, the people would have died like flies," he says. In theory, Port Harcourt does have a health care system, but it's not something that residents can afford.

'An Extremely Filthy and Broken City'

Despite having worked in Port-au-Prince after a devastating earthquake destroyed the Haitian capital in 2010, Lux was shocked by what he saw in Nigeria. "Port Harcourt is an extremely filthy and broken city," he says. "It's the gateway to hell." Now, the situation has become even worse. The city is threatened by Ebola.

[deutsey]

1. Appaling

[Warpy]

2. A vaccine is effective in animals and set to go into limited human trials

They need to speed up those trials considerably. Even partial protection is better than no protection as long as the vaccine itself isn't harmful to human subjects.

Many people in Africa don't trust medical care since they've seen so many desperately ill and dying people go into hospitals and die. The ones who do trust science will get the vaccine for themselves and their families. The ones that won't will have an 80-90% death rate, worse even than the Black Death in Europe.

As long as it stayed in rural villages, Ebola-Zaire wasn't a huge threat. Once the roads came in and people could flee those villages to the cities, trying to outrun the virus they already carried, I'm afraid a very bad genie was let out of his bottle.

It will come here, of course, carried by tourists or businessmen. Let's just hope the vaccine is effective and quarantine laws are passed quickly.