Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Ebola without hope

People are taking the old traditional approach to epidemics: head for the hills and leave the sick to die. As long as this is true--"The villagers who abandoned Fatu and Barnie have meanwhile themselves been shunned by neighbouring towns also in fear of the spread of the virus, Wile said."--it will probably work. If they get to take refuge in other towns, it will backfire.

That doesn't make it any less heartbreaking to read about. Protocols and supplies to help family take care of their own might have meant that the sick didn't have to die alone, but there wasn't enough time once the scope of the problem was known.

If I were a villager without resources, would I be willing to stay and tend the sick knowing I'd probably die too? Christians used to.

1 comment:

  1. I don't know if I would. There are so many hundreds of good excuses to choose from that it would be easy to find one that suited.

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