Ebola- Culture, the real issue

yoovie wrote: »

lloydrt wrote: »

well, I think, and Im not a Dr, that ebola is transmitted thru body fluids . I thought HIV was sexually transmitted as ebola is transmitted thru contact with body fluids...meaning, I dont think they were many people who were HIV pos from touching peoples body fluids, but ebola seems to be transmitted without having sex........sorry, I m trying to distinguish the difference, but I thought you had to have sex for AIDS/HIV, but not ebola?

you dont have to have sex to get HIV.

Ebola and HIV are both transmissible via bodily fluids, though Ebola is slightly easier to transmit. Heitz writes:

"HIV can only be transmitted through blood or breast milk, or via sexual intercourse, according to the CDC http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/transmission.html>>. Ebola is slightly easier to spread, but is still much less transmissible than more common infections like the flu.

The number of fluids that can spread Ebola is greater than those that spread HIV. Ebola can be spread by blood and sexual fluids, like HIV, but also by exposure to urine, saliva, sweat, feces and vomit, according to the CDC. In addition, HIV requires a direct route into the bloodstream, while fluids carrying the Ebola virus can also be transmitted via broken skin or mucous membranes in the eyes, nose or mouth."

http://www.thebody.com/content/75118/ebola-and-hivaids-similarities-and-differences.html

also

http://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-ebola-is-and-is-not-like-aids-101414

Thank you. This is what I was thinking, and wanted verified. I knew Ebola was MORE transmittable than HIV/AIDS, but was pretty sure it wasn't simply skin to skin contact that transmitted the disease- that you had to come in contact with some type of bodily fluid/excretion/waste from an infected person via broken skin/open wound or mucous membranes, and just like HIV/AIDS, of course, can be transmitted sexually, as well.

lloydrt, since you were mentioning HIV/AIDS, I wanted to mention this- sexual intercourse/sexual contact is not the only way of contracting HIV/AIDS. It can be transmitted through sharing infected hypodermic needles (using drugs), through breast milk of an infected mother, from an infected pregnant mother to child (this is NOT always the case but there is a chance/risk), from handling blood, or blood of an infected person entering an open wound/broken skin (this is a risk especially for those in the healthcare industry). Unlike Ebola, it cannot be transmitted by using the same bathroom with a person who is HIV positive, giving them a hug, eating a meal with them, or enjoying many of the normal day to day activities you would with someone who is HIV negative.

w734q672 wrote: »

"The culture of the places that are infected is perpetuating the Ebola epidemic. All the planes, troops, and paper money that we throw into African nations won't fundamentally change the way African communities live their lives, which involves eating bush meat- the origin of the disease as proposed by scientists.

Bushmeat was eaten for millenia prior to urbanisation and diseases were not spreading through poplations.

Urbanisation is a major factor here. Disease can spread rapidly through an urban population where there's limited access to clean water and poor management of waste and sewage.

Addressing poverty is also vital.

And let's not forget that many traditional African societies have been majorly disrupted by war, colonialisation and all sorts and people are no longer living traditional ways of life and instead are living in urban communities in very poor living conditions. To say that what's going on now is a traditional African way of life is incorrect and IMO quite racist... it's like implying that Africans have never been able to live in anything other than poverty. It's similar to what happened in the UK after the industrial revolution - people stopped living in the countryside (where they'd been well fed and reasonably healthy, because population density was low and they could grow their own foods and barter trade their crafts for food and other things they couldn't grow themselves) and started living in cities and working in factories, where they ended up living in extremely overcrowded conditions, ate a nutritionally inadequate diet, had no sewers, had no access to healthcare. These populations were ravaged by disease, whereas their predecessors had been a lot more healthy. It's a similar situation - moving from a traditional rural way of life to urbanisation frequently results in poverty and vulnerability to disease.

The global community may be able to convince a small segment of the urban elite/ upper middleclass of African nations not to eat bushmeat, because they don't want bushmeat- they want McDonalds. However, you're not going to convince the average tribal farmers/villagers/peasants to simply change their diet. In fact, it would be morally reprehensible to try to convince them not too, because it a standard protein source in their diet. Understandably, most of these people in these infected areas are starving. If I'm starving to death, do you think I give a f- if the bat that I just ate might be sick, especially when I probably don't think viruses exist and illnesses comes from demonic possession? Of course not, I'm going to eat that bat, and I'm going to eat that chimpanzee because it looks tasty too."

I think you need to change the culture if you're going to solve this problem. What do you guys think?

This part of the quote really emphasises the fact that it's poverty and lack of access to better food sources that's the issue here. Giving people access to education and better healthcare is what's needed.

Saying it's wrong to force people out of traditional ways of life is kind of missing the point. The traditional African ways of life didn't result in the Ebola or HIV epidemic (that too came from chimpanzees through eating bushmeat) - bushmeat was eaten for millenia, but these diseases only arose after urbanisation; that involved many people living in extreme poverty with little or no access to clean water, healthcare, etc. etc. Viruses don't easily jump the species barrier, this happened in human populations because the conditions the humans were living in allowed the virus to spread rapidly for human to human, which is the right conditions for the virus to evolve to be able to infect humans rather than chimps. SIV (the chimp equivalent to HIV) was in chimpanzee populations for millenia, humans ate chimps for millenia, there is scientific evidence that people caught SIV from chimps, but it didn't spread from human to human (it couldn't) until the conditions were right for it to evolve through natural selection to adapt to infecting humans (i.e. it evolved into HIV). Urbanisation and extreme poverty (in particular high population density and a means to spread rapidly from human to human) gave the virus that opportunity.

To address the problem, you need to address the issues of poverty, overcrowding, lack of proper sewage disposal, lack of clean water, lack of access to education and a lack of access to good healthcare. And there's nothing remotely immoral about telling people not to eat chimpanzees, so long as they have other foods to eat instead and you educate them as to why it's a problem (including why it's a problem in modern times, but wasn't a problem when the population density was lower and people were living traditional lives). Educating people isn't stopping them living in their traditional way of life, it's giving them a choice as to how they want to live their lives.

If you want another example, there was this remote tribe somewhere in polynesia who ate dead people as part of the funerary rites. This caused them to get a disease called kuru, which is very similar to mad cow disease (i.e. it's prion disease). The researchers explained to the tribal leaders how kuru spread, what it was caused by, and that it was their traditional practice of eating dead people that caused it....... and they stopped eating dead people. They still live a traditional way of life and kept their other traditions. They chose to abandon that particular one, once they understood that it was harmful. No-one gets kuru anymore in that tribe. They made that choice for themselves, because they were educated. There is nothing remotely immoral about this. But going back to chimpanzee meat in Africa, people can't make that choice if chimpanzee meat is the only protein they can get hold of and they don't trust the people who are trying to educate them about it. Those issues don't come from traditional African ways of life, they come from extreme poverty and the fact they've been screwed over by people in authority before so why should they trust them?