Salty and Spice talk about the lessons learned by studying the 2014-2015 massive Ebola outbreak, and how those lessons affect preppers in First World countries. Go to Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You by clicking HERE!
Salty and Spice talk about the lessons learned by studying the 2014-2015 massive Ebola outbreak, and how those lessons affect preppers in First World countries. Go to Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You by clicking HERE!
spk_0: 0:01
Hello, everybody.
spk_1: 0:02
Hello, everybody. And welcome to the show the big show, most exciting and entertaining and critically acclaimed podcast that is recorded in our living room Because we're in the living room today because it's winter and winters out there, the ice and snow and it sticks. How's that? She's got the resistance band on her foot now
spk_0: 0:23
because otherwise I'd just be sitting here still on dime. Not very good at sitting still.
spk_1: 0:27
Welcome to the show, and we have another mystery episode In case you heard the Resistance fan. If you hear the Resistance Band episode at some point in time, these two shows air being recorded at the same on the same day. So she's I was just doing the resistance, man. Now she is. So you know what we're talking about. It's a mystery show because she doesn't know the topic of what we're talking about today, But I do pan, so she's just gonna She doesn't know the answer. She's going to make stuff up because you never know with this one. She could talk all day about just about any subject. Whether she knows anything about it or no, I'm the same.
spk_0: 1:05
I was born to be on the Internet, I guess.
spk_1: 1:08
Yes, You don't live probably within 50 miles of anybody listening. This which makes you an expert. That's what makes you an expert you know about living within 50 miles off.
spk_0: 1:18
Then we are beautifully suited to be experts on everything.
spk_1: 1:21
We don't live within 50 miles of you. Chances are really good. So welcome to the show today. We're here to talk about Ebola. Ebola able Not just Ebola, though, because Ebola is kind of a way to specific subject to really worry about prepping wise in America. And I know some people freak out with these. Oh, my God, she won't know. Not Ebola is not an American problem at the point in time, and I don't anticipate it ever becoming one.
spk_0: 1:50
Yeah, it's not high on my risk list.
spk_1: 1:52
Having said that, there are many lessons to be learned from the Ebola crisis, and one of them is something that kinda hits home to us here in the United States. And that is the subject of a article she just wrote about. Who do you trust? Who do you trust when it comes to information about infectious and communicable diseases and information in general about disaster situations. So I'm gonna turn that over to you, and you can just spill being
spk_0: 2:33
well. Where this post came from is I've been taking a free online course produced by the Harvard Global Health Institute. The title of the course is lessons from Ebola avoiding the Next Pandemic. And it was taking a look at the big Ebola outbreak they had in West Africa in 2014 and 2015. Looking at what went right in the response, looking at what went wrong in the response is seeing what we could learn from that to reduce the chances of okay it reduce the frequency of that kind of epidemic or pandemic situation in the future.
spk_1: 3:13
Okay, now it's important to realize that this is not old stuff we were living. We're talking about stuff that's being done in the iPhone world. In the modern Internet world war, where communication exists but not everywhere,
spk_0: 3:29
communication is to the major cities in Africa is just a Z Z as communication to most places in the U. S. Lots of people have cell phones that they use them for Internet connection. They can get lots of information there. They don't have electricity. A lot of the outlying rural areas where the epidemic started. And a lot of these places don't have any health care framework to speak of in those places. They at the time when the outbreak happened, one of the country's had 50 physicians in the whole country, which shone a population basis, rounded out to about the same a CZ Boston, Massachusetts having 15 doctors for the entire city. So very little in the way of resource is there. And the outbreak of Ebola got out of hand, and it spread to three different countries in a major way and lots of other countries in a minor way. It infected tens upon tens of thousands of people. It killed more than 10,000. We don't know how many more, because, frankly, a lot of people didn't trust. The government didn't trust trust the health workers. And so when they got sick, they got as far away from what health care there was a possible.
spk_1: 4:48
Now there's several caveats that we we need to talk about here, and I think the first and most obvious is there's a lot of us here in the U. S. A. Don't trust our government much, and we're not going to make this a political podcast. But I'm just saying there's a lot of people that don't trust our government. But compared to like the government of Liberia, E. You know, it's a whole different. We got a lot more
spk_0: 5:16
effective watchdogs. Let's put it that way.
spk_1: 5:18
Yeah, they're they're not really. When it comes to watch dogs, they are like a, um ah, a little plastic dog on the head of a Pez dispenser. You opening up in a Pez comes out. That's that's how much of a watchdog they really are. And there's a lot of other reasons that the people don't trust the government. In my very mean, it's to just have the Civil War, and I mean all that stuff. Another caveat is Ebola, when properly treated, properly handled when you actually have proper medical supplies and medical training is not that dangerous. As faras, the spread is hard to spread,
spk_0: 6:04
not hugely hard, but not nearly as easy as people imagine,
spk_1: 6:08
right? I mean, it's not like the flu, which is much easier to read. So there's that caveat to so don't really freak out so much about Ebola. It's not too much the disease, but it spread so big for many reasons. And that's what this is about. Um, she mentioned something about this in a previous story, but the thing about Ebola isn't it's really hard to spread relatively hard to spread. But it's apparently Justus harder, even harder to figure out that it is Ebola in the first place.
spk_0: 6:41
If you're living in somewhere with endemic malaria, which the Ebola looks a heck of a lot like malaria in the early stages and it looks a lot like some of the other diseases, they've got Roman around down there because the first presentations air these really specific things like nausea and vomiting and fever. Oh, boy, that's helpful,
spk_1: 7:01
and especially when you know there's no real way to do lab tests. You don't have health workers who know what to look for. And even if they did, it really does look like a lot of these other world diseases.
spk_0: 7:14
And when we say health workers in these villages, we don't mean physicians. We don't even mean nurses. We mean some local caring individual who has learned a few things from a nurse or from a doctor and is combining that with a bunch of local knowledge, some of which is really good and some not so much. And there's not not a lot of training there. So where the trust issue comes in, is was that did figure out they had an epidemic. It started over and getting, and they started putting the word out. Okay, we've got an Ebola epidemic, and we need to have these infection control measures so we can not spread Ebola all over the place. So some of the things we want you to do our quit shaking hands with everybody you meet because that is the social greeting. Your best friend, your newest friend, your casual acquaintance. You're going to buy something from you. Shake hands with everybody, apparently in Liberia when you meet him. Uh, don't shake hands so much, make sure you wash with soap and water, wash your hands with soap and water and you know, basic hygiene kinds of things. And frankly, there was a whole lot of distrust when the word first came out. At first, there's a lot of the health workers are just making this up. We don't have any Ebola were in West Africa. That's a Central Africa thing. And until this time it always had been a central Africa. Things was the first outbreak in West Africa, so they didn't believe it. Why not? I cannot think of one way anybody would benefit by making people think there was Ebola epidemic when there wasn't so it didn't even make sense that anybody would make up this story. So all I can think of is that they didn't want to believe it, and therefore in their minds, it must not be true. There's never had it before. We don't want it now. We must not have it now.
spk_1: 9:16
That is about us human. Nothing is there is. They were living in denial, even though that's a different part of Africa.
spk_0: 9:27
So a lot of people didn't believe there was an epidemic at all. And when individuals started showing the symptoms that they'd get the fever and then get the nausea, the vomiting, they would just pass it off and tell themselves they had a touch of malaria or something. There's some willing suspension of disbelief. There are willing suspension of belief in spite of evidence. I didn't want to believe there was an epidemic at all. And then when they did believe there was an epidemic, one of the things the health messages that the people were pushing is if you know anybody who's showing these signs and symptoms, she gotta bring them to the Ebola treatment centers so we can take care of wth. Um, and if you look at the Post, I wrote for this up on three b. Y. It's linked to a neat little of video. Salty found what was put out by the Red Cross, Red Crescent and UNICEF, which, in my opinion, did not have any deep conspiracy motives for putting this out. They I have no doubt they were trying to do their best for people, and they were encouraging people to bring sick people to the Ebola treatment centers rather than try and take care of him at home. Because the way you catch Ebola is mostly by caring for somebody else who has Ebola caring for them or it while they're sick, caring for them after they're dead. Those are the two main ways you catch Ebola most likely ways, so they want you to bring them to the Ebola treatment centers to reduce the spread of disease rather than taking him home to your home village and having all 15 people who come to the funeral get Ebola, that happened several times. So they want you to bring him to the Ebola treatment centers, and they've got this little video out there to encourage people to do that. And the West Africans did not want to bring their people to the Ebola treatment centers because what they had figured out is they were good at containing the people who had Ebola there to reduce the spread of disease. But they did not have the resources, and they didn't have the people to actually care for the persons who were, well, let's just say incarcerated there that bring you in and they give you a bed and they do their best. But their best was, frankly, not very good. At the beginning of the epidemic, there was very little care available and there was a very high mortality rate. And if you think of how it would be if somebody you loved had that fever, maybe they've got malaria. Maybe they've got Ebola. Do you want to take him there. Do you want to leave? But a place like that where you think they're not going to get good care, But they're just gonna be held there until among all the sick people, until they either get it and die or get better and eventually get released. If you care for that person, you probably want to take him home and care for him yourself. And that's what a lot of people did.
spk_1: 12:31
That's while the people died.
spk_0: 12:32
That's why a lot of people died. If you are the one who's got the fever, you want to tell yourself that maybe it's malaria and I'll just move one village over where they don't know me and I'll just rent a little place or I'll stay with my cousin or something like that. It's probably not Ebola anyway. And if I go there, I'm gonna be around a whole bunch of sick people. I'm definitely gonna get it. Then if I don't have it now, you're gonna want to go to that treatment center. Ah, you don't wanna go. So you're gonna go to your cousins in the next village over and now the next village has an outbreak of a boat. So the people did not trust the Ebola treatment centers in the early stages of the disease. And as it turned out, there was a good reason for their lack of trust. There just wasn't very good care available in those places. Most of the Western aid workers, a lot of them who got Ebola, actually survived it because they air flighted him out the hospitals with good care.
spk_1: 13:29
And you know, a lot of people do actually survived. Ebola, when well cared for, is not a desolate, still gravely serious disease. But it's not like a 95% of the people by if they're cared for, kept hydrated, you know, go through the procedure, the processes given medications to keep their the other stuff from killing them, like the pneumonias in the Yeah, I know
spk_0: 13:57
opportunistic infections. So the people didn't trust the Ebola treatment centers, and that was a big factor in the spread of the disease. The governments were trying to keep people from moving country to country, and it worked really well with the airlines because the airlines quit flying in and out of these countries, which was its own problem because you couldn't get you couldn't get personal protective equipment and gloves and doctors and stuff in, but it didn't manage to contain the disease, because all you need to do to transmit the disease to the next country over is have one guy on foot who's maybe just a little feverish right now. And instead of walking over to the Ebola treatment Center, he walks over to the border to the next country on this two lane cow path, where they don't have any real guards, visits a village there and, poof, you've got an outbreak started there. So when governments put out information, there was two lines of things going on in this particular break this Ebola outbreak. But the governments were kind of split between. We want to get the word out and make it sound as serious as possible to get people to pay attention to this in the areas where we don't have it yet, we want him to be really careful. We want him to do the control measures, so we're going to cast it as this big, big, serious deal, even though we're not there yet. And on the flip side, of the coin. When the audience was different, they would downplay the seriousness of the disease because they didn't want to lose the foreign investments. They didn't want all the foreign workers to go home. They didn't want the foreign businesses to shut down. This Ebola epidemic was an economic disaster for the involved countries because nobody would trade with them. And all their foreign investment got us far away from the disease as possible by going elsewhere. So the word that was out there was slanted very heavily in terms of what it is that the people putting out the information wanted you to believe about it. It wasn't just here is the truth. As best we know it, it was I want you to not leave. So I'm gonna downplay it, or I want you to be careful, so I'm gonna talk it up. It
spk_1: 16:21
is difficult to know. In other words, the governments were speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
spk_0: 16:25
Yeah, and of course, the people we're talking to each other and spreading stories, and the vast majority of those were a big fat bucket allies because people didn't know. And you know how people are they just talk whether they know something, take some little shred of evidence and get entirely convinced their opinion must be true and spread it far and wide as if it were gospel.
spk_1: 16:50
Yeah, there's this one guy he got. He had no that Ebola stuff, but they kept him at home and he got better. Turns out the guy had malaria and you got got over the attack, you know? But they don't know the difference. That kind of stuff.
spk_0: 17:03
Do you trust going to healthcare facilities when there's a bunch of people with Ebola around? A lot of people didn't. And there were more people killed by the increases in malaria and and maternal deaths and childbirth deaths and early infant deaths from black of vaccines. Those killed more than the 11,000 people that Ebola killed in this epidemic because people were staying away from health care facilities once they realized they did have an epidemic.
spk_1: 17:29
Many people here in America we're staying away from with health care Workers were flown in infected. You know, people were staying away from hospitals that I had him in isolation,
spk_0: 17:40
which was ridiculous. You're having chest pains and you're staying away from a hospital because there's one person in that hospital with Ebola. You have just made a terrible risk management assessment.
spk_1: 17:53
Yes, you have.
spk_0: 17:54
And it's been based on fear rather than logic.
spk_1: 17:58
But you know how many people are really good at risk management decisions turned out. Not very many
spk_0: 18:04
humans are bad at that in general, especially when it's something really in your face and scary like Ebola, which is a bad enough disease when you're perfectly factual. But it's even worse once you let the media get hold of it and they, you know, start taking their clips from Hot Zone, the book and things like that. So yeah, Thea health providers were doing their best, and they were being as honest as anybody in this whole story, the places where they had the most success, where the places where they already had an underlying trust with population, where they did have somebody with reasonable training had been there taking care of people that that person would say, Hey, look, there is Ebola over there in the capital. We do have to do these things to be careful. Those efforts were successful, but when you had strangers coming in. Say, I'm from the government. I'm here to protect you. Good. We're not, You know, in some cases there were good reasons for that.
spk_1: 19:03
Doesn't really especially again. It's This is a different level too, because, I mean, there's a lot of mistrust of the U. S government. But the Liberian government, I mean, really is there even one at the moment, you know which warlord is in charge of it at the moment? I mean, some of these other the central African was like the Congo, and stuff like that are just basically war zones and have been for years. So it's a it's a bad deal. It's a really bad to you. But sorry I had John. Okay.
spk_0: 19:38
Health workers were doing their best, but they their focus is public health rather than personal well being. Governments tend to slant the information in ways that suits their audience at the time. Ah, random people who have no real reason to deceive you are often completely wrong and can't be trusted despite the fact that they're really good people and they make good barbecue. So have having some underlying knowledge yourself so you can sort out what's plausible in what's not giving what's given what you already knows about the best friends you got
spk_1: 20:17
writing. It is. Have you got anything else for us today?
spk_0: 20:20
It's basically what I had.
spk_1: 20:22
Okay, well, so since I'm goingto talk you into wrapping my very sore ankle right now, after I finished my exercises, I'm gonna hang up the podcast. We're gonna see if I could talk you into that. I have to be real nice. I'll have to pay in chocolate. Well, that's how I have to pay. I pay in chocolate
spk_0: 20:40
sometimes with peanut butter in it. I'm not that
spk_1: 20:42
peanut butter. And she's not proud. You're not proud she'll take peanut butter. She'll take no peanut butter. She likes appear, but okay, we'll talk to later.