OscailtUS using Ebola crisis to move more of it's military forces into AfricaIt seems the US has realised it can cynically exploit the current Ebola crisis to further increase it's military presence in Africa. Speaking at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia Tuesday afternoon, President Barack Obama declared: “Faced with this outbreak, the world is looking to the United States and it is a responsibility we are prepared to embrace. We are prepared to take leadership on this.” This is, of course a load of horseshit. It's just an excuse to bolster US military forces in a resource rich region.
Breaking news: Italian MP, Sgarbi denounces the Statistical Fraud on COVID-19. The speech of the Member of Parliament Vittorio Sgarbi in the session of the Italian Camera, Meeting no. 331 of Friday 24, April, 2020. Vittorio Sgarbi, denounces the closure of 60% of the businesses for 25,000 COVID-19 Deaths, of which the National Institute of Health says 96.3% died NOT of COVID-19 but of other pathologies. That means only 925 have died of the virus. 24,075 have died of other things.2014-09-26T17:44:13+00:00Indymedia Irelandimc-ireland@lists.indymedia.iehttp://www.indymedia.ie/atomfullposts?story_id=105030http://www.indymedia.ie/graphics/feedlogo.gifcapitalism has a lot to answer for in the ebola crisishttp://www.indymedia.ie/article/105030#comment2996362014-09-26T17:44:13+00:00fredanother article from WSWS revealing how capitalism has failed the people experie...another article from WSWS revealing how capitalism has failed the people experiencing this outbreak<br />
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<blockquote style='padding: 0.5em; background-color: #CCFFCC;'><em> “The present [Ebola] epidemic is exceptionally large, not primarily because of biologic characteristics of the virus, but in part because of the attributes of the affected populations, the condition of the health systems, and because control efforts have been insufficient to halt the spread of infection.”<br />
—Dr. Christopher Dye, director of strategy, World Health Organization<br />
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In the understated words of a health professional, this is a diagnosis, not just of the Ebola catastrophe, but of the failure of capitalism as a world system. Thousands have died and millions are at risk because the social conditions in the affected countries, long oppressed and exploited by the imperialist powers, have made adequate treatment of the outbreak impossible.<br />
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Ebola is a well-understood disease, spread only through direct contact with bodily fluids, and almost self-limiting in isolated rural areas because it usually kills victims before they can transmit the virus to many other people. The cumulative death toll from all previous outbreaks of Ebola was barely 2,500 people—a number exceeded in only three months by the current outbreak.<br />
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The epidemic began in rural Guinea before spreading to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia. In Liberia, for the first time, Ebola became an urban and not a rural phenomenon, and the capital Monrovia is the first large city to experience such an outbreak, with terrible consequences.<br />
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In all three countries, the local health care systems have collapsed under the impact of the epidemic. In Sierra Leone, for example, the country’s only large children’s hospital has been forced to close after a child was diagnosed as suffering from Ebola. In Liberia, there are only a few hundred treatment beds available, meaning that most victims stay home and are cared for by family members, who then become infected.<br />
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These three countries are among the poorest in the world, ranking 161st (Sierra Leone), 176th (Guinea) and 181st (Liberia) in per capita GDP according to the 2013 World Bank listing (185 countries total). The combined health care spending of the three countries is only $900 million, a pitiful $45 per head.<br />
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Their people live in misery, but the countries themselves are rich in natural resources that have been ruthlessly exploited by major corporations and the imperialist powers that enforce their interests.<br />
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Liberia (founded by freed American slaves, and a de facto US colony) has vast resources of iron ore and palm oil, and Firestone (now Bridgestone) has operated the world’s largest rubber plantation there since 1926. Sierra Leone, a former British colony, is a top-ten diamond producer, with large reserves of rutile, a titanium-based ore. Guinea, a former French colony, has iron ore, diamonds, uranium, gold and an astonishing half of the world’s total reserves of bauxite, from which aluminum is derived. The Australian-Canadian firm Rio Tinto Alcan and Dadco Alumina of Germany dominate bauxite extraction in Guinea.<br />
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In the past three decades, all three countries have been ravaged by civil wars, coups and ethnic massacres, with their ruling elites fighting to control sources of raw materials to sell to the giant Western corporations amid increasingly difficult economic conditions on the world market. The imperialist powers directly intervened, with British and UN troops occupying Sierra Leone and the US Marines landing in Liberia.<br />
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It was the combined effect of decades of imperialist exploitation and intervention, exacerbated by the global economic crisis that erupted in 2008, which created the conditions for the present health catastrophe. When the Ebola virus made its way out of isolated jungle areas where the borders of the three countries come together, the resistance of the social organism to the epidemic was as weak as the resistance of the individual human organism to the attack of the virus. </em></blockquote><br />
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Full article here:<br />
<a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/09/26/pers-s26.html" title="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/09/26/pers-s26.html">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/09/26/pers-s26.html</a>ebola deaths pass 4000http://www.indymedia.ie/article/105030#comment2997022014-10-12T02:57:44+00:00fredWorld powers stand by as Ebola death toll passes 4,000
The World Health Organiz...World powers stand by as Ebola death toll passes 4,000<br />
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<blockquote style='padding: 0.5em; background-color: #CCFFCC;'><em>The World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Friday that the death toll in the ongoing Ebola epidemic continues to rise with 4,033 deaths out of 8,399 cases in seven countries. Almost all of the deaths have occurred in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria. According to the latest report by the WHO, there is no evidence that current efforts have been able to bring the epidemic under control.<br />
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Given the scale of the social disaster in West Africa and the threat to the entire world’s population, the response by the United States and other imperialist powers has been derisive and entirely irresponsible. Rather than reacting immediately with a massive multibillion-dollar emergency humanitarian aid program involving the deployment of thousands of doctors, nurses and health care workers, the US government waited almost an entire year to respond in any significant way to the Ebola outbreak.<br />
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Now the Obama administration is planning to spend $1 billion over the next year funding a military operation to build a limited number of treatment centers. This response is grossly inadequate for stopping the epidemic and derisory compared to the $1.1 billion the US government has spent in the last four months alone on bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Instead of seeking to halt the Ebola epidemic in its tracks, the Obama administration is utilizing the humanitarian crisis as cover for expanding its military presence in Africa.<br />
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Over the next year approximately 4,000 soldiers will be deployed to Liberia under the command of AFRICOM under the guise of building Ebola treatment centers and testing laboratories. There are no plans for US military doctors or medics to directly engage in the treatment of Ebola patients. </em></blockquote><br />
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full article here:<br />
<a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/11/ebol-o11.html" title="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/11/ebol-o11.html">https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/11/ebol-o11.html</a>