Saturday, October 18, 2014

EBOLA BACKLASH

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here we go again playing politics with the lives of our people. It is clear that the Tapion Hospital's administrators have no regard for human life. I wonder if it were a member of one of these nurses family who had come down with Ebola if they would "take them away." This is absolute nonsense and ignorance to the core. That the Ministry of Health is still pussyfooting in the face of Ebola hitting the island shows the lack of respect St Lucian authorities have for Saint Lucians and human life at large. It is sad that I belong to a country with such a high population of philistines!

October 18, 2014 at 3:48 PM
Anonymous said...

@3:48 - I don't know which article you read to conclude that someone was "playing politics with lives of people". Looking at what happened with that hospital in Texas, it seems obvious to me that if a hospital does not have the capability to treat Ebola safely, it is simply endangering more lives by taking in Ebola patients.

If Tapion does not have the means to treat Ebola patients, it should not endanger everyone by taking them in. What the government needs to do is to ensure that there are health facilities and emergency response teams that do have this capability.

October 18, 2014 at 5:25 PM
Anonymous said...

Don't worry! Kenny will return from Cuba with all the answers. His ALBA partners are experts in the field.

October 19, 2014 at 4:27 AM
Son-of-man said...

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As the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is getting out of control, there are developing reports blaming the US for manufacturing Ebola and HIV viruses as part of its military’s bio-weapons projects using African people as guinea pigs.

Reports have pointed out that the US and a number of Western countries are using the Ebola outbreak to expand their military presence in mineral-rich Africa, challenge China’s growing engagement across the continent and offer their pharmaceutical companies the opportunity to gain financial benefits from development and sale of potential treatment drugs.

Leading the charge on the role of the US military in the development and spread of the Ebola virus in Africa is Liberian scientist, Dr. Cyril Broderick, who alleges that the US Department of Defense (DoD) is engaged in funding Ebola trials on humans that commenced only weeks before the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and Guinea last January.

According to Broderick, a former professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Liberia who also taught for many years at the Agricultural College of the US-based University of Delaware, the Pentagon granted a USD 140 million contract to Canadian pharmaceutical company, Tekmira, to perform Ebola research, which involved “injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus.”

“Hence, the DoD is listed as a collaborator in a ‘first in human’ Ebola clinical trial, which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March,” Broderick wrote in a September 9 article in Liberia’s largest newspaper, Daily Observer.

“Disturbingly,” he added, “many reports also conclude that the US government has a viral fever bioterrorism research laboratory in Kenema, a town at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.”

This is while the US government has been experimenting with deadly diseases on human beings for a lengthy period of time.

One clear instance took place between 1946 and 1948 in the Central American nation of Guatemala, where the administration of then US president, Harry Truman, collaborated with the client state’s authorities to deliberately infect more than 1,500 soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and even mental patients with syphilis and other sexually-transmitted diseases.

Insisting that the U S, Canada, France, and Britain are “all implicated” in the development of the Ebola epidemic, Broderick also blamed the World Health Organization (WHO) and Doctors Without Borders of bringing Ebola to Africa through vaccination programs.

Meanwhile, other press reports allege that the US views the Ebola outbreak as a “perfect opportunity” to achieve a long-held Western objective to expand a US military presence in Africa to challenge growing Chinese investment and influence across the continent.

This is while the Washington Post reported in August that China “has arguably become the most formidable of the foreign players in Africa” in recent years by surpassing the US as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009.

Further pointing to the US military agenda in Africa, media reports have underlined statements made by US Vice Admiral Robert Moeller in a 2008 Africom conference held at Washington’s Fort McNair, saying that Africom’s mission also aimed at preserving “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market.”

Moeller also wrote in a 2010 opinion piece in the Foreign Policy Journal, titled ‘The Truth about Africom’ that “Let there be no mistake. Africom’s job is to protect American lives and promote American interests.”

October 20, 2014 at 5:32 PM

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