The interval between the onset of symptoms and death has been 48 hours in the majority of cases, and “that’s what’s really worrying,” Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital, a regional monitoring center, told The Associated Press.
The latest disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo began on Jan. 21, and 419 cases have been recorded including 53 deaths.
According to the WHO’s Africa office, the first outbreak in the town of Boloko began after three children ate a bat and died within 48 hours following hemorrhagic fever symptoms.
It’s not the bat’s fault really. If us humans would stop encroaching further into their territory and stopped warming the planet to the point of no return, we might not be having such extreme issues with zoonotic viruses we’ve never encountered before trying to kill us.
Don’t even need that much; just stop eating them.
If people aren’t living in the bat’s territory they wouldn’t be eating them either.
Fair.
Easy to say to starving children. (Which is what happened in op’s article)
Too bad there’s no one who could solve world hunger for 6 billon dollars…
Well I SAID should be sending them foo… Oh…
It’s the Congo.
King Leopold was one of history’s greatest monsters. Rubber tree plantations - they’d chop a hand off or worse if you didn’t make quota. (The Heart of Darkness, later retold as Apocalypse Now, later retold as Spec Ops: the Line.)
The region has been ravaged for the past two centuries. Remember Kony 2012? Those starving children could have been soldiers.
This has nothing to do with climate change that generic area of the world has always beet stock-full of nasty diseases. Even considered by African standards of unlucky geography the Kongo basin is triply fucked.