Residents in eastern Congo have attacked and burned part of a health center treating Ebola patients.

Residents of a town at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo attacked and burned part of a health center where people are being treated for the virus, and 18 people suspected of infection left the facility, a local hospital director said Saturday. It was the second such attack in the region in a week.

Unidentified people arrived at the clinic in Mongbwalu on Friday night and set fire to a tent set up for suspected and confirmed Ebola cases by the Doctors Without Borders humanitarian group, Dr. Richard Lokudi, director of the Mongbwalu General Reference Hospital, told The Associated Press.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    13·
    6 hours ago

    Even the name “Spanish” flu is because of denials from other nations:

    The outbreak did not originate in Spain,[49] but reporting did, due to wartime censorship in belligerent nations. Spain was a neutral country unconcerned with appearances of combat readiness, and without a wartime propaganda machine to prop up morale,[50][51] so its newspapers freely reported epidemic effects, making Spain the apparent locus of the epidemic.[52] The censorship was so effective that Spain’s health officials were unaware its neighboring countries were similarly affected.[53] In an October 1918 “Madrid Letter” to the Journal of the American Medical Association, a Spanish official protested, “we were surprised to learn that the disease was making ravages in other countries, and that people there were calling it the ‘Spanish grip’. And wherefore Spanish? …this epidemic was not born in Spain, and this should be recorded as a historic vindication.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

    I don’t think we can convince people to remember it as the more accurate “1918 flu”, so maybe the “not-spanish flu”?