Comment by SilverElfin
1 day ago
I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.
Exemplified by the ridiculous Hanta-Virus news/social media coverage for weeks - even though the risks were much lower and contained - but it happened on a CRUISE ship which the news people thought might resonate with the western vacation crowd.
I view that situation differently. The Andes strain of hantavirus does spread human to human and isn’t well understood. I think caution and coverage makes sense. After all, someone caught it just sitting near an infected person on a plane.
A disease affecting developed countries impacts the entire world. A disease affecting the Congo doesn’t impact anything.
it doesn't until it does
I mean it obviously impacts the people who live in the Congo...
If that outbreak was in a midsize European town like Marburg they would even name the virus after it.
But not if there was a virus that broke out in, say, Wuhan.
You think an outbreak, in for example Belgium, would be 24/7 news in Demorcatic Republic of Congo?
The DRC is a former Belgian colony, so yes.
Have you ever been to the DRC? Its former colonial master plays almost no role in Congolese society. Belgium made little effort to spread its culture to its colony, rather like the Dutch in Indonesia. Then, after independence, most of the population became isolated from the outside world as central government and education broke down, and the main impact on the country’s politics from outside came from larger, stronger powers than Belgium was.
This is such a weirdly tilted and aggressive response, complete with Facebook style demand to prove some strawman nobody ever claimed.
Yes, outbreaks of extremely contagious and deadly disease often are major news stories in other countries, and yes western nations often ignore outbreaks in global south nations.
You might not like the tone, but I don’t think it is a strawman argument.
The discussion is about whether the western media is paying insufficient attention to the Ebola outbreak simply because it’s in DRC, and DRC/Africa doesn’t matter.
The post you responded to is suggesting a different hypothesis: that the media is paying limited attention because it’s in a country quite a long way away, on a different continent. In line with this hypothesis, it’s not unreasonable to question how much attention the press in countries a long way away would focus on a viral outbreak in a European country.