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.
Fuck yes! A deadly pandemic without long drawn out suffering? Sign me up!
I’d rather have a few months of major discomfort than the two days of hard-core body horror that they just went through.
Yeah those 48 hours don’t look too fun either though.
Feel awful for those affected.
Sadly, that makes this unlikely to go pandemic. If it kills too fast it can’t spread.
We’ll have to live a little while longer… 😒
God damn it
This guy has definitely played ‘Pandemic’ the flash game
Specifically the flash version?
I guess not lol, but I did think it started as a flash game.
I believe you’re correct, though I haven’t played any version of it so I’m not an authority.
This was just meant to be a gentle ribbing, no worries about your actual level of accuracy.
Until some poor sap examining the body gets a tear in his PPE and he gets the mutated version that turns him into a zombie
gets a tear in his PPE
I winced. Is it confirmed it can be transmitted sexually?
I’m not sure if this is satire or not lol.
If not: https://www.osha.gov/personal-protective-equipment
If so, haha pp funny
Yeah, just a dumb PP joke, sorry.
lol no need to apologize, like I said, pp funny
The earth will be ok. One day we’ll be gone and she’ll be just fine.
People say save the earth, save the earth. The earth is fine. The people are fucked. We’re going away, folks.
I’m pretty sure when people say that they mean “save the [current state of the] earth [so we can continue living on it together]”.
They were quoting George Carlin.
I guess I should tell him too. Maybe wait until after the show. 🙃
Frankly, she’ll be better off.
Its too bad I don’t care about the rock we’re floating around in space on and mostly care about me and my loved ones.
This is a dumb framing. People want to stop climate change to protect themselves and their loved ones from having to live in an inhospitable hellscape and doom humanity to extinction, not because of an emotional connection to the actual planet.
To me it’s ridiculous that we have no reverence for our actual, objective God: the living Earth.
All the fairy tale imaginary sky daddies people kill other people over while actively desecrating our factual creator with abandon.
We’re so weird. We have a creator. The natural world. And we’ve been in a hot war with that only actual God of humans for about a quarter millenia, lol.
We’ll lose handily. And life will go on.
There are definitely religious and spiritual systems that revere nature, like paganism. It’s the only thing that really makes sense to me.
That’s a generalisation.
Plenty of people have reverence for the natural world.
Certainly not plenty, given what’s happening.
And I don’t mean empty rhetorical reverence.
Reverence would mean having a zero to positive net environmental impact. Like the Native Americans. They weren’t perfect or necessarily peaceful between one another, but they practiced reverence towards the natural world.
Those with practiced reverence towards the natural world don’t fare well amongst our species. We take humble coexistence with the Earth as weakness like clockwork. We jail them for ecoterrorism and genocide their cultures because they get in the way of economic and population metastasis, sadly because we consider our God to be subject to us and not the other way around as we’re going to learn in the coming decades by our own actions and hubris.
I mean “learn” loosely. Sadly many wouldn’t admit to themselves we were wrong or abandon currency as their god even if a CAT 6 just hurled a bus at their head.
That’s subjective as it depends on your definition of reverence and of plenty.
That said, it’s a very good point you raised initially and I wholeheartedly agree that it’s a bit weird.
I agree that the natural world is, for all intents and purposes, analogous to a god.
I also agree that everyone, particularly the most pious of us, seem determined to disregard this god.
Religion is the wrong word, but I do wish that there was more focus on building appreciation for the natural world.
I’m reminded of the “solar punk” movement. There’s an instance slrpnk.net which collates some of these ideas.
Oh you didn’t need to tell us you care more about your stuff then anyone else’s, bud.
Fine, and the the innocent people on it. Jesus fucking Christ.
My point was that Earth itself is just an object with things living on it.
I might be aggressively fucking angry at like 90% of the voting eligible populace in America but there are a ton of other people that don’t fit into that category that don’t hold my ire.
None of us are innocent.
Shit, have I run into someone more misanthropic than I am right now? Neat.
A misanthrope that cares about “innocent” people? Seems fishy.
the first outbreak in the town of Boloko began after three children ate a bat
You’re kidding me
Do we need awareness campaign for “don’t fucking eat bats”? Didn’t know we were that hopeless as species.
Economic desperation and lack of education. Think back to how dumb humans were just like 400 years ago, which is what 20 generations or something? Essentially no grasp of diseases in the modern sense. We are biologically 99.9999% or whatever the same as them.
Ebola spread during that ~2015 outbreak in large part because local customs meant washing the dead and otherwise being in close physical contact. Sadly, people simply didn’t know better.
Also, this is exactly why dismantling USAID was such a phenomenally stupid idea.
You want more plagues? This is how you get more plagues.
From how our Oligarchs have been speaking about the rest of us for quite some time, I’m thinking they want more plagues to get rid of us pesky useless eaters. Hence the destruction of our public health establishment.
I doubt these kids had many food options dude .
deleted by creator
EBFO? Eat a bat and find out.
Inb4 congo virus lab conspiracy theory
there have been legitimate concerns that the ongoing violence in the DRC could result in lab leaks and whatnot. I believe there are or at least once were some small lab outputs in DRC bush set up to help with monitoring for diseases.
They had a previous outbreak in December that was diagnosed as malaria. This outbreak is not that one but malaria has not been confirmed as the culprit.
In any case, please don’t go to Congo to bring whatever it is to the rest of the world. Let WHO experts figure it out…if only a retard president had not pulled funding for that vital global health organization.
We can insult Trump without restoring to ableist slurs.
Genuine question, would calling him an idiot, or some other euphemism, be better? It all boils down to “ableist” if you consider it deeply. How do you insult an individual without insulting people like them?
“Idiot” was once a medical term for severely mentally disabled people, along with imbecile and moron for less severely mentally disabled. Those terms were used to insult people and eventually became pejorative. The term “Retarded” was introduced to avoid the insult associated with “Idiot”. Now “retarded” is insulting and has been replaced by “developmentally disabled” or “special” or other such nonsense.
I mean, yes? Are there jackasses, douchebags, and shitbirds out there I should be worried about offending?
We should be allowed to insult people for their lack of intelligence.
Stupid people should not feel as though they have the same voice as everyone else.
Unfortunately, their voice is louder.
In general, value statements are meaningless except as an emotional expression and are a sign of an inability to be articulate and specific in what an issue is. It’s kinda why ad hominems are considered fallacies. Trump is a giant piece of shit though and that’s fine to say
Oh god, this is why people stop being loyal to your side.
LOL, that you think loyalists are better than educated people who can tolerate hearing philosophies they don’t agree with and then being able to CONSENT once they understand, or dissent if they don’t agree
You think education is angering because it’s hard for you to learn
And you think mindless agreement in a cult setting is my DESIRED outcome for working with others
Even toddlers understand to not use that word or slurs, and can learn to not do so. Toddlers make an effort because they care about fairness. Go watch some Mr Rogers and see if you can’t be as progressive as a toddler in the 70s.
Fascists, man
You’re clearly too far gone.
Lol
Speak for yourself. I’ll slur all his disabilities any chance I get.
I haven’t seen the r-slur used since the mid 2000s, and now suddenly it’s everywhere in the past 2-3 weeks. Why are we back-pedaling on even the most basic decencies?
Removed by mod
Literally society regressing in front of our eyes.
I am thinking a Congo vacation might be the cheapest thing I can do to save America. Go straight fro the Congo to a Republican fundraiser.
I can think of cheaper!
It was a sick ostrich
Allegedly
Was gonna say unexpected letterkenny but then I saw you come from lemmy.ca so…
Unknown… Ate bat. The entire gebuz loving world said they wouldn’t eat bats anymore, but some kid somewhere in Congo found them tasty again. WTF! Bats look ugly for a good reason. They carry diseases! Stop eating bats! Eat chicken instead! Please eat chicken!
That sounds like something a bat would say.
I’m not iii iii a bat! Are you some kind of penguin?
Shouldn’t be eating penguins either. But for different reasons.
Alfred! To the batmobile!
Seriously! Just ask your dad to run to Whole Foods, dummy!
ITT: People that think only bats get human-transmissible diseases.
No, but they get some nasty stuff that if transmitted to humans more often prove lethal. It is due to bats having an incredibly high body temperature (even more so than most other flying things though most of them are high). Human fever really cannot compete with that and our bodies may just kill themselves with the viral response IIRC.
Exactly, it can go bat -> livestock/pet -> human just as well.
I’m just one person wondering why it seems like bats are involved so often in stories like this.
Yeah who has ever heard of bird flu?
Because of the physiological and energetic demands of flight, bats are tolerant of a wide range of viruses.
Guess I need to change my dinner plans for tonight.
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,”
That’s also great news because it’s easy to identify infections, quarantine, and contain. What would be really worrying is a hemorrhagic fever with an incubation period of 5-21 days a la covid.
Absolutely!
Another example is HIV: Initial infection is just a minor flu, you’re then infectious and active for 5-10 years before becoming seriously ill with AIDS (of course this is for untreated HIV). This allowed the illness to spread for decades adapting to humans before finally being identified in the 80s, killing millions.
Just gonna tack on here that everyone’s favorite presidential whipping boy, ol’ Ronnie shithead Reagan, was partially responsible for allowing it to continue spreading. Hell, his press secretary or some equivalent laughed at the one reporter that actually asked about it and implied the reporter was a homosexual. He also abandoned his buddy Roy Cohn because of it too.
May he rot in piss.
I’m afraid there may be a resurgence of the HIV denialism movement given that RFK is now secretary of health.
That’s also an old Soviet intelligence classic, so I’d bet you’re spot on.
HIV denialism
Because of widespread use PREP/PEP, there’s a growing number of people who stopped using any protection including the aforementioned meds…
Given that he thinks HIV/AIDs is the result of Amyl Nitrate abuse already, he just has to say it official.
That quote doesn’t tell us anything about the incubation period unfortunately.
Just because they died right after showing symptoms does mean that’s when they were infected. Maybe you’re contagious for 3 weeks then cough twice and die.
Have a nice day.
Have a nice day.
I don’t think I will
Yeah no thanks, you have a nice day 🤣
Why don’t you both have a nice day? 😤
Honestly, every last one of you can go have a nice day, as far as I’m concerned.
Don’t tell me what to do, you’re not my parental figure
Yeah, these kids could have been bat-snacking for quite some time before they came down with any symptoms. Or they’d eaten bats without problems before they lost “bat roulette” and ate one with this particular disease.
Can’t we just have a regular old plague that kills like 30% of the population and not that sigma “I don’t really want to kill you” bullshit?
Covid was so annoying, because it killed too few people for many to care. I don’t want that again.
So i know (hope) this is satire. I’m also aware that people latch on to dumb things and propagate them, like Flat Earth and the like. So I’ll clarify that with a 2% morality rate there were literally dead bodies stacking up in the streets in NYC.
The only reason the right wing propaganda machine was successful in misinforming rural areas was because the administrations efforts to reduce/slow the spread of COVID, haphazard as it was, turned out to be successful in preventing mass deaths like that seen in NYC. And it was a close thing.
The thing is people are so goddamned gullible, so credulous of their media of choice, that a 30% mortality rate would only fuel more dumbshittery
If you’re really careful, you might see that I qualified that statement above
it killed too few people for many to care
The emphasis is there for a reason.
And BTW, that statement is not a joke, but based on actual study results. You know why? Covid having a 2% mortality also means it has a 98% survival rate - much much higher in younger healthier people. Exactly that was the problem. For the vast majority of people covid did not feel like a real threat, because it wasn’t. Long covid and the other long term effects only really came to light in 2021 and later.
I didn’t shelter in 2020 for myself, but for others. If there is no such thing a society, individuals will act like selfish assholes and don’t wear masks, get vaccinated, etc. If Covid would have caused widespread erectile dysfunction, the entire world would have been shutdown in 5min and nobody would even doubt masks.
WHO, governments, responsible media lost the war about representing and reacting to the pandemic right in most places and there weren’t much pushback against misinformation.
Salting the wound: after antivaxxing became a part of people’s identity, got coupled with their political views, the critical mortality rate to sober up the majority only grew higher.
I avoided it because I don’t like being sick. It sounded like a pretty shit thing to catch, now had it like 4 times but at least after vaccination and it’s been fairly mild.
Why yes, actually! The bird flu pandemic should be along any day now (just waiting on that one last mutation to be able to spread between humans), and that one’s projected to have a super-high death rate.
Bird flu could be that. By some estimates it has had a 51% mortality rate, compared to COVID’s 1-2%. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d still rather not. Maybe you don’t mind seeing those you care about die in pain, but some of us had enough of that a few years back.
90% mortality rate for pregnant women.
ate a bat and died within 48 hours following hemorrhagic fever symptoms
Are we seeing another Ebola outbreak? Or is this a different viral hemorrhagic fever?
All samples were negative for common hemorrhagic fever diseases, although some tested positive for malaria.
Looks like at minimum, it’s a strain of Ebola that’s different enough not to register on a test.
We should really stop eating bats.
spoken like someone trying to keep all the good bats for themselves
I’ll take all your
deliciousbat meat and dispose of it safely for you
I apologize in advance for my ignorance. But why do people like to eat bats? Are they particularly nutritious? Or is it a matter of access to foods and resources? Are they really yummy? And why didn’t Ozzy contract any weird deadly disease?
Pretty sure you eat anything possible when you’re starving, and these children may have been.
This is why we had programs like USAID. To keep people from starving and eating infected animals harboring endemic viruses we know nothing about.
Even in the US, it’s highly inadvisable to eat animals/bush meat infected with CWD even if it technically can’t infect humans …yet.
is it a matter of access to foods and resources
This is generally why people eat certain things, yes.
Because they need to eat.
Why do people eat chicken if there’s a risk of getting salmonella?
You cook it…
Yet thousands of people get salmonella every year from under cooked chicken and some die of it. Eating bat is the same, cook it correctly and it’s safe.
Why not eat something nice and normal instead of a bat though? I mean FFS
Why not eat something
nice and normalthat westerners think is normal instead of a bat though? I mean FFSFixed that for you. You know different regions and cultures have different norms for foods, right?
Do they? Most everywhere people eat basically the same shit. Preparation methods vary and there’s substitutions historically based on available resources but globalisation has practically obliterated all that.
I’m not a westoid BTW I’ve traveled a decent amount.
people eat basically the same shit
Buffalo sauce is a rare sight in Europe, as is white gravy. Americans consider them an everyday occurrence.
I’m struggling to think of a single component of a hot dog or sausage that isn’t “normal” to eat everywhere in the world except for reasons of religion and even then it depends on what meat was used to make it.
because you’re used to it.
Also, you replied to the wrong person
You’re absolutely correct, in fact most food is usually variations on a theme e.g. meat in bread like sandwiches, burgers, burritos, tacos, dumplings… but this isn’t a popular opinion unfortunately.
I’m curious as to whether this is lack of experience, knowledge or imagination. Maybe all 3.
have you tried bat?
Could be manna from heaven, for all you know
No? Why would I? Is there anything that makes them as a food source particularly beneficial?
Eating bat vs. eating air seems like a no-brainer in the survival dept.
Do you ask yourself the same thing when eating any other meat or you just have something against other cultures?
You may be surprised to learn that “normal” changes based on your culture and geographic location.
I’ve changed geographic location many times, there’s a huge difference between pickling vs. breading and eating fucking bats.
Culture is a spook and an excuse for simpletons.
Lol wtf makes a bat not normal?
Well, for starters, most are pretty small and there’d not be much meat on them anyway. It would be a lot like eating mice, but with more bones.
Do you eat bats often?
You ever eat a hot dog? Crazy stuff in there just as sketchy as bat.
Maybe in the US? I’m sorry but we still have food regs in europe
In reply to this, I give you Andouillette.
I forgive you. 🤗
Unless you don’t eat meat you don’t have much of a leg to stand on right now
Huh? Meat I eat isn’t considered to be a risky source of novel zoonotic coronaviruses
Chicken is safe as long as you cook it properly
Beef is safe as long as you cook it properly
And guess what…
Bat is safe as long as you cook it properly
People get sick and die from under cooking beef and chicken all the time, will you stop eating it because of that?
Fuck! Dudes! I strictly repeated several times to not eat bats so we could prevent another covid! WTF was wrong with these people? Bat= not food!!! Other not foods include but not limited to Stork, venomous things, pets, people, clouds, poop, teeth, big cats, other cats, armadillos, rinos, elephants and other nature show animals. Food animals… Chicken, tilapia, cow, pig.
Now the next and most important thing to do is: 1) don’t go to Congo to see or touch or be near the dead. 2) don’t come back from Congo if you saw, touched or were near the dead. Easy peasy.
Obviously this was a mutant rabies virus. Let’s call it RabiesUltra25…RU25 for short. Thanks for reading! Look out! Behind you! Gotcha!
Rabies takes waaaaaay longer to kill you than whatever those poor kids got from bats.
“Drugs are bad, m’kay?”
If you want to stay up for a few nights, read The Hot Zone, which is about Ebola. Those bats are gonna kill us all someday, and there are so many of them!
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51N5u7HMbaL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg
This one will keep you up at night, it was SO fucking interesting. It’s basically a story about a crime fighter who goes in and solves really complex crimes…but all the crimes are weird diseases, like strange brain swelling diseases that are gonna kill a ton of people in the US, and the detective has to figure it out before a bunch of people die.
We have the technology to solve insane cases, but we are completely hamstrung by mentally deficient politicians like our current idiot and his party. And how we still prevailed despite their obstructions.
The image link is to the cover of The Premonition by Michael Lewis.
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.
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.
Easy to say to starving children. (Which is what happened in op’s article)
Well I SAID should be sending them foo… Oh…
Too bad there’s no one who could solve world hunger for 6 billon dollars…
If people aren’t living in the bat’s territory they wouldn’t be eating them either.
Fair.
Tbf, even if we gathered all people in one giant city to stop encroaching, bugs would follow us due to our food storage/waste and blood, and bats would follow the yummy bugs and make homes in the structures we make, which like for pigeons are often good for bats too. Bats, rats, and some birds you’ll never be able to really escape by avoiding nature because they follow us or something else that does.
I was tripping on shrooms on day, looking at the grass and noticed an ant scurring around then another and little, tiny beetle looking bugs. Then i looked out across a field and saw gnats,bees ,wasps , flys, 20 or 30 birds in the distance , a couple squirrels and thought about the worms under my feet and realized this is their world we just live in it. We are outnumbered a million to one and they don’t need us at all
And no matter how hard some try, they’ll never escape it all.
I prefer to live as close to it as possible instead, and as in harmony with it as possible. I do like electricity and running water though lol, but I’d rather be amongst nature than my “fellow” man any day.
For your next psychedelic trip, think about your gut microbiome.
I try to take care of those little beings as best I can
This does sound wild.
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.
When this civilization falls and the next one is beginning there’s going to be a religious ban on eating bats.
If it flaps, you slaps. Amen.
Confused, currently fapping my slap.
The Bible already addresses this:
https://www.biblestudytools.com/topical-verses/what-does-the-bible-say-about-bats/
