If you paid attention to the news in 2014, you definitely heard of the West Africa Ebola outbreak. The outbreak started in Dec. 2014, with the first documented case being found in a village in Guinea. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention believed that the virus was contracted from bats. The first fatalities were in Jan. 2014.
But did you know that there was a more recent outbreak, that is still going on, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? The CDC has predicted that this outbreak could last another year. This is due to people’s reluctance to seek treatment. Gabriela Saldivia, a producer for NPR, in an article on a recent attack on an Ebola treatment center wrote that “These attacks on treatment centers greatly hinder the ability to contain the virus, as people flee the scene out of fear.”
These attacks have contributed to mistrust of the treatment centers. In the region, vaccines and treatments are readily available, but people are reluctant to get treatment. It is truly horrible that people who already have a potentially fatal disease are being put at an additional risk with these treatment centers being attacked.
