Having served the people of Guinea for the past twenty-four years, I find two of the many reports recently released by the World Health Organization (WHO) especially troubling. There’s just so much more to the Ebola story than the media broadcasts.
Late last week, we heard a spokesman declare the Encouraging news that the cases of Ebola had dramatically decreased over previous weeks. They did report that Guinea stood as an exception, having ten more new cases last week than the previous week.
While we can be optimistic for the regions where such findings prove true, we aren’t even cautiously optimistic for our host country, Guinea. Here’s what the WHO failed to tell you:
1. Of the new cases, a significant number were diagnosed in areas where an Ebola Treatment Center is not available, and the patients refuse to travel to the equipped site.
2. Of the Ebola deaths reported, twenty-nine had been buried in the traditional way—without any of the mandated precautions to prevent Ebola transmission employed.
3. While some areas of Guinea are submitting to the Health Department’s recommendations, yesterday’s report listed thirty-two sous-prefectures (like counties) who absolutely refuse the admittance of health workers to train and equip the population in methods to prevent the transmission of Ebola.
In fact, these areas report violent confrontations with health workers over the distribution of the bleach solutions they bring to disinfect contaminated areas. Their extreme reactions are attributed to their belief that the solution actually contains Ebola.
The military has been mobilized to assist the health workers, resulting in gunshot-related injuries and deaths
In one remote village, a pastor and his son, who sought permission to have a clean water well dug for the population, were severely beaten. Convinced that the pair would put Ebola into the water, the villagers tried to kill them.
When a spiritual leader complained of fatigue, a policeman offered to give the leader a shot of Vitamin B, since he’d been helped by that medicine in the past. Sadly, the leader died. The police and his chauffeur were both killed by the population in the area, accusing the policeman of injecting the spiritual man with Ebola to kill him.
The same spirit of fear that drove a mob to destroy the brand-new Red Cross trucks, and kill eight people on a health team during a demonstration of the proper use of bleach last fall continues in Guinea.
We find no relief in the WHO reports of decreasing numbers of new cases of Ebola, because the people are perfecting their methods to hide the sick and bury the dead, without being discovered by authorities. At present, there are six empty beds for every one Ebola patient in the Treatment Centers.
Truly more money will not stop the spread of Ebola where fear reigns. Only prayer that the Lord will open the minds of the terrified population to receive truth regarding the minimal necessary changes in their traditional practices will stop the spread of Ebola.
Early Monday morning I listened to a bit of news that dropped a cannonball in the pit of my stomach. Two Ebola vaccines are being distributed to 27,000 volunteers in Liberia this week. Since the reports at the end of the previous week included the dismantling and burning of the Ebola Treatment Centers, due to the government’s declaration that Liberia’s Ebola epidemic is nearly over, one wonders how these experimental vaccines can be tested, where no Ebola exists. Or, are the people being vaccinated to test if the Ebola-Zaire strain in the vaccine really is safe?
Let me remind you of the cold, hard facts that physicians valiantly attempted to provide the media from the inception of the current Ebola crisis. Ebola is extremely difficult to contract. It is not now, nor likely ever will be, a virus that can infect people by just breathing the air of a sick person. One simply must touch the infected bodily fluids of the dying person to get Ebola from him. Even the physician who initially identified the Ebola virus stated that there was no need for the development of a vaccine for Ebola, since there was no risk to the general public.
Because the cultural burial practices of western nations don’t include stroking the loved one’s body as part of the funeral services, and the common practice when one in the western world gets quite ill includes a trip to the Emergency Room, the risk that Ebola will ever lead to a worldwide epidemic is only grist for fiction writers. We simply have nothing to fear but fear itself. However, as I have indicated above, fear can kill.
In II. Tim. 1:7(NKJV), the Apostle Paul encouraged young Timothy, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
Thank you for helping us pray that all in authority in Guinea will rise up and move in that God-given power; and that the leaders in Liberia will use a sound mind, motivated by love, not greed, when recruiting volunteers for experimental trials in any vaccination program.
