and now there is an Ebola Outbreak

[Marshtit]

no proven cure,
fatality is around 50%

that is a worry

Of course you were worried for yourself or else you’d have worded your opening post differently.

It's the 17th outbreak apparently. Needs proper health education/awareness. But it's Africa. If it was diamond or rare earth minerals there would be £££££££££££ spent.

er no

Miss Marple you are Not

They always report them as a concern, of course they would. It’s serious if it spreads but it never does. This time is no different to any other time. I would seek help for your anxiety. Ebola pandemic isn’t coming to the UK anytime soon.

OP as sad as this is, there are outbreaks of nasty diseases around the world all the time. Pre-Covid the UK media wouldn’t have reported them at all, so we’d never know.

Even now, the media report things that are topical. News reporting is completely inconsistent. Have you ever noticed that if, for example, there’s a particularly nasty dog attack, then the news is full of reports of dog attacks. Every dog bite is reported for a couple of weeks, then it stops and the reporters move on to the next thing.

Lately we’ve had the meningitis outbreak and hantavirus, so infectious disease is topical, and getting more attention. Reporters ham it up because catchy scary headlines grab people’s attention.

Bad stuff happens all over the world all the time. If it bothers you then donate to the relevant charities. No need to try and whip everyone else up into a frenzy,

it's called knowledge and risk assessment.

And not pandering to others virtue signalling and desire to be dementors.

There are hundreds of people in the UK going to die in RTAs this month, hundreds of thousands worldwide.

A few dozen in the UK will die falling over this week. Thousands worldwide.

Along with a million other ways people are going to die, all at much higher rates than ebola deaths.

Are you posting threads saying 'what a worry' about that?

There are different strains, the current vaccine for the big killer strain, doesn’t work for this current, less deadly strain. I suspect there will be more research but like you say, it’s not going to get pharma huge £££ from it as it affects very few in the grand scheme of things

I knew of someone in the community where I live who died of Ebola after being in Africa many years ago. It was so sad and made all the sadder for his family as he couldn’t have the usual funeral rights performed by his family after his death and was just taken away from the hospital to be buried in a lime filled grave.

i have no personal anxiety

The regions where Ebola outbreaks happen are very well experienced at dealing with them and preventing spread. This is why many of these areas were minimally affected by COVID, because they are experts at managing communicable diseases

You'll get a right bollocking for causing a panic bland spreading misinformation on here, for asking a perfectly reasonable question on here OP. Hopefully some of the kinder Mumsnetters will be able to reassure you though. It is worry upon worry these days.

This.

In your OP you state “it’s a worry”. I’d argue that on a list of global worries, an Ebola outbreak is very low down. TB causes over a million deaths a year, for example. And the biggest cause of death for young men in much of the world is suicide. And hundreds of women die in childbirth every day.

@Frumpitydoo OP didn’t ask a question. She posted 11 words of doom.

You do realise this is the internet and although MN is mostly UK users people can log on from absolutely anywhere in the world?

There was a huge ebola outbreak in maybe 2013? So many people died and it spread around west Africa. So I would be worried if I was there, but since it never made its way out of Africa I have no concerns it will come here.

I hope they manage to get it under control soon, it's an awful disease. If I remember rightly it seems to affect poorer areas more, and the funerary practises that encourage touching the dead can spread it.

I'm feeling lucky I don't live in a third world country but equally terrible for people who do, and who have governments who can't respond to disease as effectively as ours can.

I also think that if you’d worded your opening post differently you would have got different responses.
It read like you were worrying about it spreading and worried about catching it yourself.
If you’d mentioned the people of the DRC and how awful it was for them in the first post I think a lot of people would just have agreed with you.

I don’t think it’s so much glee at the prospect of another pandemic so much as the realisation that these things don’t always happen ‘over there’ in other places to other people we don’t know or see so shouldn’t care about.

No, in reality this likely won’t become a pandemic but before Covid hit the UK lots of people were very dismissive that it would become an issue in Europe, or specifically in the UK.

We now know differently, so it makes sense that people take more notice of things like this happening around the world.

Where did OP say they are concerned for themself?

And i'd imagine someone from the DRC who comes into contact with bodily fluids would've mentioned that was why they were worried.

And i'm sure they would have been sympathised with but posters would also have reassured them that even if living in the DRC and coming into contact with bodily fluids, the chances of them contracting and dying of ebola are still incredibly, incredibly remote.

The country has a population of 116 MILLION people. There are 246 suspected cases and 80 suspected deaths.

There is more chance living in the DRC of dying of falling over, choking, RTA drowning or anything else than of ebola.

Responses on here are quite shocking, as if the only thing we need concern ourselves about is another covid style pandemic and lockdown. The west Africa Ebola outbreak was a huge disaster, despite the fact Ebola is so deadly it can't spread like covid. Are people not aware of that one?

I"m concerned for people in the affected areas and surrounding countries. Cases have been identified in both Kampala and Kinshasa indicating wide undetected spread, including into well connected capital cities, hence the declaration by WHO. I don't need to be concerned for my personal safety or way of life to find this a concern.

Totally with you on this OP.

An international concern means it is not just in DRC. There have been cases in Uganda.
It is far from the biggest cause of death in Africa.

Doesn't thins happen all the time in certain parts of the World?... like Malaria, which is one of the biggest killers.

But you're not concerned for all the people in the DRC and everywhere else in the world dying of other things?

Because ebola kills an absolute tiny minority of people anywhere there is an outbreak. Tiny.

Why is your focus of worry on ebola?

Malaria kills thousands there a year. And covid. And diarrhoea. Pneumonia. TB. Neonatal disorders. HIV/AIDS. Measles. RTAs. I could go on. All much much bigger killers in DRC and West Africa.

Ebola isn't even in the top 50 leading causes of death. It's incredibly rare.

You're more likely to be murdered in DRC than die of ebola. Ebola is so rare it can only be counted in statistics at outbreak level in specific areas whereas the national rates are 0.00-0.01 cases per 100 thousand people whereas murder at a national level is 13.5 homicides per 100 thousand people.

So why the fixation?

We aren’t here to do ourselves favours. Your initial posts referred in an imprecise way to “worry “, not suggesting compassion for suffering.

There is pretty much always Ebola somewhere. I’ve had friends who have worked on outbreaks before (infectious disease expert here). Don’t let the Daily Mail make you spiral with their click bait. There’s always hantavirus and Ebola out there, just usually doesn’t make the news (unless white people are dying, let’s be honest 🙄).