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“Those people like Ebola. They’re becoming famous and successful from it,” hollers a middle-aged male parishioner wearing a black suit, near the end of an 8-minute ramble. “They can keep it. Ebola will never reach this church,”

Mention Ebola in Goma and you’ll hear a riot of rumors, half-truths, and conspiracy theories about the disease: that it doesn’t exist; that it’s been imported for financial gain; that it’s being used to kill people as part of an organ theft plot. A study published in September in the journal PLOS One found that 72% of respondents were dissatisfied with or mistrustful of the Ebola response and 12% believed that the disease “was fabricated and did not exist in the area.” Misinformation is a key factor in making the outbreak so difficult to stamp out

Long an incurable disease, Ebola may someday be preventable and treatable thanks to recent drug advances. Still, with an almost 70% fatality rate during this current outbreak, Ebola continues to be obscenely lethal. To survive it, early medical intervention is key. But Pastor Jules Mulindwa, a compact man with a receding hairline and a thin mustache, has his own protocol. While he doesn’t discount medical science, he doesn’t believe it’s necessary.

Deadliest Ebola Outbreak on Record Is Over, W.H.O. Says

DAKAR, Senegal — The World Health Organization declared on Thursday the end to the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record, which killed and sickened tens of thousands of people in West Africa, even as it cautioned that more flare-ups of the disease were likely.

recent chain of cases in Liberia was snuffed out, marking the first time since the start of the epidemic two years ago that Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone

The Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo announced today that a new outbreak of Ebola virus disease is occurring in Wangata health zone, Mbandaka, in Équateur province. The announcement comes as a long, difficult and complex Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is in its final phase, while the country also battles COVID-19 and the world’s largest measles outbreak. Initial information from the Ministry of Health is that six Ebola cases have so far been detected in Wangata, of which four have died and two are alive and under care. Three of these six cases have been confirmed with laboratory testing. It is likely more people will be identified with the disease as surveillance activities increase. “This is a reminder that COVID-19 is not the only health threat people face,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “Although much of our attention is on the pandemic, WHO is continuing to monitor and respond to many other health emergencies.”This is the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 11th outbreak of Ebola since the virus was first discovered in the country in 1976. The city of Mbandaka and its surrounding area were the site of Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 9th Ebola outbreak, which took place from May to July 2018. “It’s happening at a challenging time, but WHO has worked over the last two years with health authorities, Africa CDC and other partners to strengthen national capacity to respond to outbreaks,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. “To reinforce local leadership, WHO plans to send a team to support scaling up the response. Given the proximity of this new outbreak to busy transport routes and vulnerable neighbouring countries we must act quickly.”WHO is already on the ground in Mbandaka supporting the response to this outbreak, as part of capacity built during the 2018 outbreak. The team supported the collection and testing of samples, and reference to the national laboratory for confirmation. Contact tracing is underway. Work is ongoing to send additional supplies from North Kivu and from Kinshasa to support the government-led response. A further 25 people are expected to arrive in Mbandaka tomorrow. WHO is also working to ensure that essential health services are provided to communities despite these emergency events.The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 10th outbreak of Ebola, in North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri provinces, is in its final stages. On 14 May 2020, the Ministry of Health began the 42-day countdown to the declaration of the end of that outbreak. New outbreaks of Ebola are expected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo given the existence of the virus in an animal reservoir in many parts of the country. 

President Donald Trump made 115 false claims over the last two weeks of February, during which he faced a growing crisis over the coronavirus pandemic, visited India, held four campaign rallies and addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference.Trump made 67 false claims from February 17 through February 23; that was the 11th-highest total of the 34 weeks we've fact checked at CNN. He added 48 false claims from February 24 through March 1; that week ranked 25th out of 34. As usual, many of the false claims were ones he has uttered before.

aim: "Russia, if you're listenin

The fact that there is notorious video footage showing all this has not stopped Trump from making up an alternative history. He told CPAC on February 29 that he said "Russia, if you're listening" as "a joke," in front "25,000 people," and he was "laughing" afterward along with others in the crowd -- but the media cut off the clip "so quick at the end" so that people couldn't hear all of this laughing.

Guinea is tracking down people who potentially had contact with Ebola patients and will rush vaccines to the affected area as soon as possible following at least three deaths from the disease,

unlike during the deadliest known outbreak, which tore through West Africa in 2013-2016, Guinea had the means to halt the resurgence of the virus

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday warned the outbreaks in Guinea and Congo represented a regional risk.

DAKAR/NEW YORK, Oct 23 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Leroy Ponpon doesn't know whether to lock himself in his flat in Monrovia because of the deadly Ebola virus, or because he is gay. Christian churches' recent linking of the two have made life hell for him and hundreds of other gays.

"Since church ministers declared Ebola was a plague sent by God to punish sodomy in Liberia, the violence towards gays has escalated. They're even asking for the death penalty. We're living in fear," Ponpon told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone from Monrovia.

Ebola has infected almost 10,000 people in West Africa since March, killing around half its victims. Liberia is the worst hit country where poverty, corruption and civil war have left a weak health system unable to cope with the exponential spread of the disease.

Sierra Leone officials have confirmed a death from Ebola, hours after the World Health Organization declared the latest West Africa outbreak over.

he country was declared free of the virus on 7 November, and the region as a whole was cleared when Liberia was pronounced Ebola-free on Thursday.

Tests on a person who died in northern Sierra Leone proved positive, an Ebola test centre spokesman told the BBC.

The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.

Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

A Nigerian drug smuggler at Madrid's international airport who started shivering after the cocaine bags he was carrying inside his body burst was left to die after airport authorities activated an emergency Ebola alert

When Disease X actually arrived, as Covid-19, governments, businesses, public-health officials and citizens soon found themselves in a state of chaos, battling an invisible enemy with few resources and little understanding—despite years of work that outlined almost exactly what the virus would look like and how to mitigate its impact.

Governments had ignored clear warnings and underfunded pandemic preparedness. They mostly reacted to outbreaks, instead of viewing new infectious diseases as major threats to national security. And they never developed a strong international system for managing epidemics, even though researchers said the nature of travel and trade would spread infection across borders.

Underlying it all was a failure that stretches back decades. Most everyone knew such an outcome was possible. And yet no one was prepared.

the critics misunderstand what’s going on here. Fear isn’t only a function of risk; it’s a function of isolation. We live in a society almost perfectly suited for contagions of hysteria and overreaction.

we’re living in a segmented society. Over the past few decades we’ve seen a pervasive increase in the gaps between different social classes. People are much less likely to marry across social class, or to join a club and befriend people across social class.

That means there are many more people who feel completely alienated from the leadership class of this country, whether it’s the political, cultural or scientific leadership. They don’t know people in authority. They perceive a vast status gap between themselves and people in authority. They may harbor feelings of intellectual inferiority toward people in authority. It becomes easy to wave away the whole lot of them,

The World Health Organization on Monday declared the mosquito-borne Zika virus an international public health emergency due to its link to thousands of birth defects in Brazil, as the U.N. agency sought to build a global response to the threat.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told reporters that coordinated international action was needed to improve detection and expedite work on a vaccine and better diagnostics for the disease, but said curbs on travel or trade were not necessary.

The WHO said last week the Zika virus, transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, was "spreading explosively" and could infect as many as 4 million people in the Americas. The Pan American Health Organization says Zika has spread in 24 nations and territories in the Americas.

Burkina Faso Begins 3 Days of Mourning After Al-Qaida Attack

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Burkina Faso began three days of national mourning Sunday and the president said security would be stepped up in the capital and the country's borders after al-Qaida militants killed at least 28 people in an attack on a hotel and cafe popular with foreigners.

people of Burkina Faso must unite in the fight against terrorism. He also announced on the national broadcaster,