PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (9)
Will you get Ebola?
I am quite sure that you’ve heard the word Ebola by now. It was named after a river in Sudan, where, on July 6 1976, a storekeeper, identified only by the initials of Yu. G. of the Zande tribe, died with blood running from all his body’s openings. The mysterious disease spread through his rural area, killing many people and then, with no more reluctant bodies available, the virus went into hiding.
We all know that Africa today is a vulnerable conglomerate of nations. Before 1800 it consisted of scores of tribes, with only at its southerly tip, Cape Town, a white settlement. The place originally was named Kaap van Goede Hoop -Cape of Good Hope – which the globetrotting Dutch used first as a stopover to the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia, and later as a good place to settle. Africa then was pre-colonialist and largely forest, with people living within the means of creation, not unlike most of North America’s native people before 1500.
In early 1800 Europe discovered Africa and carved it up between England, France, Germany, Belgium and Portugal, robbing it of its people and natural treasures. It really never recovered from this rape. Now it often lacks basic health services, totally different from our situation. Or is it?
My question: “Can too much medical care be equally dangerous?”
William McNeil, University of Chicago historian, and a native Canadian, studied the matter of infectious diseases and discovered that each catastrophic epidemic event is the ironic result of humanity improving its overall condition, because as its health and wealth increase its vulnerability to disease also goes up. Dr. McNeill writes that “the more we win and the more we drive infections to the margin of human experience, the more we clear a path for possible catastrophic infections. We’ll never escape the limits of the ecosystem. We are caught in the food chain, whether we like it or not, eating and being eaten.”
That makes sense to me. The more hygienic we become and the more we ban dirt from our system, the fewer antibodies and natural remedies are present in our bodies and the more we become susceptible to infection. Thus anti-biotic medicine, so beneficial when having a communicable disease, may yet prove our undoing because it deprives our bodies of natural healing agents. That’s why organic food, free from pesticides and free from antibiotics so abundant in meat products, living close to the earth, and even grow your own, may be the best defense against body-killing pests.
Hans Zinsser in his classic Rats, Lice and History traces how pestilences, which reigned supreme less than 100 years ago, hastened the final demise of the Roman Empire. He states that “it can hardly be questioned that it (the great pestilence under Emperor Justinian) was one of the factors – perhaps the most potent single influence – which gave the coup de gr?ce to the ancient (Roman) empire.”
Last week I mentioned the dire die-off of wild animals. Some researchers now speculate that the substances in our waters, laced with traces of antibiotics, birth control pills and other medicinal remnants may be the root cause of their disappearance. If that is true, then the same fate may befall the human race, as we too are constantly bombarded with all sorts of unknown chemicals, an untold variety of harmful substances of which we have no clue what they do to our bodies.
Zinsser in his book also mentioned how the super healthy country boys, drafted in the army of the great Napoleon during his adventurous reign which ended in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo, died like flies when they fraternized with the sickness –hardened city soldiers. Of course the same was true for the natives in North and Central America who were decimated when confronted with the measles and smallpox and other diseases infiltrating their bloodstreams originating from the immune Europeans.
Now the rolls are reversed thanks to us simply being too hygienic. We are like a beautiful flower, kept in a climate controlled environment that will wither and die when transplanted into a natural state, exposed to wind, sun, rain and cold; or we are like a pet wild animal, raised in the comfort of a caring home and suddenly helpless when released to vend for itself in the cruel jungle.
My point is that once the Ebola virus is on the loose, we are just as vulnerable, perhaps even more so than our brothers and sisters in West Africa.
One of the laws of Ecology is that ‘nothing ever disappears.’ Every infectious disease that ever existed is still out there, somewhere, in a rat or a louse or a bat or a monkey. And it is the lot of humanity that everything will be revealed, whether the good or the bad. That’s what the word “Apocalypse” means. Since not God, the Creator, but Satan, the Destroyer, is temporarily in charge of the world, it is no coincidence that the last book of the Bible, Revelation (Apocalypse), also has a line or two about plagues. Revelation 6: 8 mentions the Pale Horse who has been given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword (drones, bombs) famine and plague (Ebola, Marburg, Bird Flu, whatever). The same book of Revelation urges us to “Come out of her, my people,” because in 18: 8 it says, “Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine.”
Right now Ebola is raging in Africa with no reasonable chance it will be brought under control there: it will have to burn itself out. This is because the countries simply do not have the administrative capacity to handle it: not enough beds, nurses, isolation suits, money.
It is my contention that we in the West are responsible for the current Ebola outbreak. It simply is another case where Capitalism, via its ruling bodies the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), conspired in the 1970s and 80s to radically alter the make-up of Africa. Why? In 1970 Ebola simply expired when it ran out of customers in the rural sections, to emerge now, 40 years later, in a totally different urban Africa. Now the crowded mega cities, their lack of infrastructure, their packed slums, and distrust in Western medicine mean that the Ebola virus is having an unlimited market.
How did this come about?
Africa changed completely when OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – started to dominate the world with its oil policies, and in the process wound up with mountains of money they didn’t know what to do with.
So the Western white money men, administering the world’s cash supply, reasoned that they knew how to develop so-called backward countries, taking their own prosperity as the only example. They told African rulers: “You’ll borrow our money, invest in development and have more than enough funds to pay off the loans.”
What really happened was that even in those countries in which the leaders didn’t steal the money the loans grew faster than the tax base, leaving governments less and less able to administer their own countries.
When we go back a century or so, Japan, Korea, the United States and Britain developed real industry behind trade barriers: that’s how they were able to flourish. But the ‘experts’ of the World Bank said to the naïve Africans: “you have a competitive advantage in certain commodities such as cash crops and minerals such as gold and diamonds. You should work on that. Since most cash crops are best grown on plantations, you must change your economy to cash crops, which means that you have to move your small self-sufficient farmers off their land. They will then settle in the cities where they’ll get jobs and earn money to buy the food they no longer grow. The cash crops are then sold to Westerners, and with all those funds coming in you’ll be able to food and luxury products from us in Europe and America.”
However, with everybody growing more cash crops, the price dropped through the floor and so a thirty year commodities depression followed. With most of the people shoved off the land and with no jobs for those forced into city ghettos, instead of self-supporting peasants spread over a large area and thus not easily contaminated, they were packed in shanty towns, in unsanitary conditions, and easily affected by dangerous diseases.
Of course some got rich by selling grain and overpriced military gear from the West, but 95% of the Africans lost their identity, their tribal structure, their proud self-sufficiency, and, thanks to immense population density, became extremely vulnerable to Ebola, to name the most current affliction.
What about the rest of the World?
Poor people with inadequate health care, nutrition and sanitation are reservoirs for disease to develop. Thanks to the current West Africa danger, other nations are at risk as well. The widespread waves of austerity and the destruction of their economies, many countries of our first world too, have left gaping holes in their medical infrastructure. Does anyone think Greece, for example, could handle Ebola? Spain already fumbled a case, leaving a nurse who said she probably had Ebola in a public waiting room for hours, while she was symptomatic.
Austerity, cheapness and incompetence kills. America has about 40 million uninsured. The initial symptoms of Ebola look a lot like the flu. Think about what most uninsured are going to do if they get a bad flu? Best case is a trip to the clinic to get some antibiotics. The same is true of many insured. Going to the hospital for a bad case of the flu is overkill, and hospital stays are expensive. It is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the USA.
Imagine you are poor, uninsured and have no paid vacation days, then come down what looks like a bad flu. I imagine you might still go wipe old people’s bums, or clean rich people’s houses, or go to work in retail. Sure, soon enough you’ll be too sick to continue, but for a few hours…
Many other countries are in no position to do the sort of contact tracking that is required to stop something like Ebola. Think of Mexico, America’s southern neighbor. Entire cities, indeed provinces, are beyond the writ of the government, essentially controlled by drug gangs.
Ebola may not be a real threat unless it mutates. It’s still fairly hard to pass it to another person; it isn’t communicable, but if it goes airborne, or if it becomes communicable during the incubation phase, it could turn into something truly horrible. And the more people who get it, the more likely a mutation is to occur.
There are some threats where we’re all in it together. Money and position may buy us some immunity, but they cannot buy us total immunity. Climate change is one of those threats; another is communicable diseases. We can be truly grateful that this isn’t the super-flu like the Spanish Flu that killed 30-50 million people in 1918. Ebola may kill in a particularly nasty fashion, but the last great Flu Epidemic killed more people than World War I.
In the meantime our poor West Africans neighbors will largely suffer this Ebola burden without meaningful help. However our real desire to help them poses a threat to us as well as we are far more vulnerable than we think. Today our lack of internal borders, the near-failed or failed (Greece comes to mind) States and austerity means that if Ebola gets a foothold it may be far harder to contain than we believe. The Ebola virus could well be the pestilence the bible book of Revelation mentions as a prelude to the Coming of the Lord.
Be prepared for Collapse.