H5N1

Uganda: Family denies exhuming body of Ebola casualty

Via The Monitor, which has done an excellent job of covering the outbreak: Family denies exhuming body of Ebola casualty. Excerpt:

The family of an Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) victim, whose body was allegedly exhumed by unknown people, have asked the Ministry of Health and the security agencies to investigate the incident.  

The incident took place in Kitongo Village, Kalwana Sub-county Kassanda District about a month ago, according to district health officials.  

While meeting the Kassanda District Ebola taskforce, Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng, and other officials at Kassanda District headquarters on Wednesday, a family representative, Mr Mubarak Muwade Kawuki, denied claims that they exhumed the body to perform Muslim burial rituals on it.  

He added that they are now being stigmatised, “causing a lot of distress to our family”.   

“Our own investigation reveals that nobody tampered with the grave,” he said.  

Mr Kawuki insisted that the rituals and the preparation of the grave were performed prior to their loved one being buried.  

He added that the interment was done by the burial team from the government.     

“There was no single reason as family members to have the body of a person presumed to have died of Ebola exhumed in the name of performing a religious burial,” he said.   

He added: “It is also interesting that when we asked the police to investigate the incident, they have failed to give us a report.”  

The family has asked the government to institute a special investigation to examine the grave and possibly exhume the body to find out if it was tampered with.  

But in an earlier interview with this paper, the Kassanda Resident District Commissioner, Ms Phoebe Namulindwa, revealed that the health officials have recovered some evidence but did not give any more details on the matter.  

She added that some people had also confessed to exhuming the body.  

“I only request the community to stop stigmatising the family because we are all focused on fighting the Ebola Virus Disease in Kassanda District,” she said.  

Meanwhile Dr Aceng urged the family to join the fight against Ebola and forget the past.  

“I will call the team and interact with them to find out what really happened. We have had some challenges in Kassanda District as we fight the Ebola pandemic. We should work as a team to stop the spread of Ebola,” she said.  

It was revealed at the meeting that the cumulative confirmed Ebola cases is now 50, while the cumulative death cases are now 18 in Kassanda District.

The next pandemic? More likely a polydemic

Last week The Tyee published my article The Next Pandemic? More Likely a Polydemic. After going through a number of unpleasant problems in global health, I concluded:

These are just some of the threats in the present polydemic, which itself is part of the present hot mess of economic decline, rising prices, war, climate change and political polarization that writers like Adam Tooze are calling a polycrisis. And it’s precisely now that Canadian health spending should be rising to support pandemic preparation and prevention, not levelling off.  

From a political point of view, lower spending makes sense. The system is still trying to catch up with all the knee and hip replacements postponed for the last two years. Inflation makes it impossible to raise taxes, and the deficit spending that kept everyone afloat in 2020 and 2021 is now politically unacceptable.  

Besides, governments have learned that they don’t have to take pandemics as seriously as they once did. Provincial governments that let COVID-19 rip have been re-elected. Public health measures like masks and vaccine mandates have triggered a populist backlash that some politicians are exploiting. Health-care workers are exhausted, underpaid and embittered.

So even if a government wanted to take the polydemic seriously, and to build up the system against future pandemics, it would face serious resistance from many voters, not to mention the business sector. Rebuilding health-care staff numbers and infrastructure would take billions, spent over more years than any government is likely to survive. Short-term emergencies would always take priority over long-term needs.  

And when the next pandemic arrived and became a short-term emergency, neither governments nor the governed would implement or accept even proven measures to protect public health. They’d recycle COVID-19 misinformation as precedent: “It was mostly mild, it only killed old people, we got through it.”  

But if it’s a pandemic as lethal as H5N1 or Ebola, which has an average case fatality rate of 50 per cent, the survivors will think otherwise.

Before 2020, the pandemic anticipators I called Flublogia were certainly worried about the impact of a new influenza or other virus. But we still had a naive faith that while it would be bad, we in North America and western Europe and Japan would have the technology and the experts to deal with it.

The response of the western nations, and especially the US, was and is a disgrace and a revelation: just as the fearsome Russian army turned out to be stupid and incompetent, so have the health systems and politicians of the "advanced" nations. If the next virus turns serious, I really doubt whether the public will listen to the advice of the health experts. Nor will healthcare workers be willing to resist another onslaught. And that, of course, will only make matters much, much worse,