Ebola, Polio, and other third world realities

Can Polio be eradicated? CDC article discusses.

Since the Global Polio Eradication Initiative began, the number of reported WPV cases has declined from an estimated 350,000 WPV cases in 125 countries during 1988 to 66 cases in two countries with ongoing endemic transmission during 2019 (as of August 20, 2019); an estimated 18 million paralytic poliomyelitis cases have been prevented during the past 30 years.

I am old enough to remember the polio epidemics in the 1950s and had two class mates who were left with residual leg weakness from it.

my medical blog has a longer post on this.
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The Ebola epidemic is still going on: 3000+ cases so far, which actually I think is good news considering the poverty and lack of facilities in the area.

StrategyPage has a long article discussing the outbreak and includes a lot of the background of what's going on: the wars and violence in the area, the big shot who stole a lot of the money, (italics mine)...and then there is the controversy about using a second vaccine since they don't have enough of the approved one.

But there are unsung heroes in the fight:

During the week that ended on September 22, Congo’s health teams conducted 2,546,148 Ebola virus screenings. Since August 2018 Congolese teams have conducted over 98 million screenings. That impressive number indicates Congolese health teams have done a lot of potentially dangerous work. Still, experience has shown the risk of Ebola transmission as very high at national (in Congo) and regional levels (central Africa) but low at the global level.

this is the link to my medical blog, and to another essay about the vaccines, including one being made by China. China has a lot invested in mines in other parts of the DRC, so are taking no chances.

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we are having a Dengue epidemic here in the Philippines (our cousin's wife just got over a case).

Yes, there is a vaccine, but only for selected cases.

the government here pushed the then experimental Dengue vaccine on kids, and because it was given to some who should not have gotten it, some kids died.

As a doctor, I probably would have approved of using the still experimental vaccine given the significant number of deaths from Dengue, but hey, this is the Philippines, so a lot of ordinary folks suspected a small "gift" changed hands, or that we were being used as guinea pigs for the big shot drug company to see if the vaccine worked.

As a result, some parents here stopped having their kids vaccinated, so we now not only have a measles outbreak and new polio cases here...and now they just diagnosed a case of diphtheria.

Sigh.

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Not medical per se, but I did post this essay about the PC including the Catholic progressives in Germany projecting their "noble savage" fantasies on Amazon tribes, ignoring Amazon infanticide controversy, and how the PC defend it, because "multiculturalism".

this exasperates me, because small interventions would enable the children to be brought up without problems.

Of course, the elites won't say it, but probably believe in eugenics:

and maybe because if they point fingers at poor tribal people in danger of starvation culling their weak, they might have to admit the trend in the modern west to kill off by late abortion every child diagnosed with Down's syndrome (and of course now, killing off inconvenient Grandmoms who are not suffering, merely senile).

The difference is that if given a choice, the tribal people would try to save their children:/

This was also my experience in Africa.

One tribe I worked with in Africa traditionally killed twins in the past, probably because experience showed that these kids would die of malnutrition, so were considered cursed...  as soon as infant formula enabled moms to feed their twins, infanticide disappeared.

in our hospital (this was 40 years ago), we had a "Nutrition village": when an underweight child was found at Baby Clinic screening or screening by our village health workers, the mom and child were encouraged to come and we would feed up the kid, while instructing mom on high protein food etc. to feed her child. Many of the children we had to feed up were, alas, twins. 

There was enough food for the kids, but once the children were weaned, they did not get enough protein in their diet.

Prevention of protein malnutrition was a major outreach by our hospital, because once they developed signs of Kwashiorkor ( the mortality was high even with treatment...

When such a child wasted away and died in the past, often witchcraft was suspected, so education was part of the outreach.

before you point fingers to the "indigenous", however, remember in the Starz series Outlander there is a subplot of a child believed to be a changeling left out in the cold, or watch this "history guy" video;