BUNIA, Congo (AP) — Authorities in northeastern Congo banned funeral wakes and gatherings of more 50 people Friday in an effort to curb a rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in a region where medical workers have struggled with a lack of resources and pushback from angry residents.
The World Health Organization said that the outbreak now poses a “very high” risk for Congo — up from a previous categorization of “high” — but that the risk of the disease spreading globally remains low.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 82 cases and seven deaths have been confirmed in Congo, but that the outbreak is believed to be “much larger.”
People set fire to an Ebola treatment center in a town at the heart of the outbreak in eastern Congo on Thursday after being stopped from retrieving the body of a local man, a witness and a senior police officer said, as fear and anger grow over a health crisis that doctors are struggling to contain.
Larry Madowo reports on CNN that fire has been started on a local Ebola containment facility in Congo. He says some locals were refused the body of a family member who died in the hospital. Most of them according to reports believe Ebola is a foreign disease brought to their… https://t.co/HYxbcuXIYQpic.twitter.com/A9Xk12l5Ii
The arson attack in Rwampara reflects the challenges of health workers trying to curb a rare Ebola virus by using stringent measures that might clash with local customs, such as burial rites. The disease has been spreading for weeks in a region lacking in adequate health facilities and where many people are on the move to escape armed conflicts.
While not really a joking making, as the world continues to deal with health scares ranging from hantavirus fears to endless social media speculation about future pandemics, another very real outbreak is now unfolding in Africa and it has officially caught the attention of the World Health Organization.
Ebola.. this time it is a rare strain..
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is now dealing with a deadly Ebola outbreak tied to the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus, and according to reports more than 65 people are already dead with hundreds of suspected cases under investigation. Some reports now place the death toll even higher.
What has health officials are nervous is that this does not appear to be the dominant Ebola strain that many vaccines and treatments were designed around.
The Bundibugyo strain is considered more rare and currently does not have approved vaccines specifically tailored to it.
Now the World Health Organization has declared the situation a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”…
This does not mean the world is facing another COVID style pandemic at least at the moment.
From health officials, Ebola spreads very differently and generally requires direct contact with bodily fluids rather than airborne transmission. .. The WHO officials believe this situation is serious enough that the world should be paying close attention.
The outbreak is reportedly centered in the conflict plagued Ituri Province of the Congo.. there has been movement between neighboring countries including Uganda causing the virus to spread..
We need the TIME magazine persons of the year again.. calling all Ebola hunters and fighters across the planet..
In the 1998 ‘The X Files: Fight The Future‘, a deadly HANTAVIRUS outbreak is used as a cover to hide the existence of extraterrestrial organisms and evidence of alien colonization…
There’s a lot of these posts regarding the hantavirus as this situation develops now, with people around the world becoming nervous because of comparisons to the beginning of COVID-19. Endless stories are circulating about more than 40 people being released from the cruise ship plagued with the deadly Andes version of the hantavirus, and anxiety online is ramping big time (for clicks many times of course)…
Let’s first say this… the X-Files hantavirus connection is weird. …the Cigarette Smoking Man reveals that a Texas hantavirus outbreak was supposedly a cover for human alien hybrid programs designed to survive an impending colonization event. A plague to end all plagues… a reset of society..
There is little doubt that scenes like this would go viral again..
But let’s think back for a moment. Hantavirus was already in the news back in 1998 because deaths connected to the virus were occurring that year as well. For example, the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer on April 12th, 1998 discussed Pennsylvania’s first hantavirus death that year.
It was a fearful time as scientists were still trying to understand the disease, and coupled with the popularity of The Stand, viruses were heavily on people’s minds.
For those who may not have been around back then, or are too young to remember, hantavirus is not something new on this planet. Back in the 1990s it was widely discussed and deeply feared. This was before social media and before the internet connected everyone instantly the way it does now, but people were absolutely talking about it.
As a matter of fact, by May 29th, 1994, scientists working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were already trying to unlock the secrets of the disease after outbreaks killed dozens of people, including victims in Nevada.
Over the years there have been additional scattered cases and isolated fears tied to hantavirus outbreaks, but this newest “plague ship” situation feels more unsettling to many people because it involves the Andes strain… and because the world itself is weary from pandemics.
That’s probably the real story here.
People are exhausted, hyperaware, and traumatized by what happened during COVID.
So now when a cruise ship quarantine appears in headlines alongside words like “deadly virus,” “human transmission,” and “Andes strain,” social media instantly transforms into a mixture of fear, nostalgia, conspiracy theories, old X-Files clips, and memories of a very different era when mysterious viruses already felt terrifying enough.
You know we’re inundated with so much information now that it’s tough to discern what really matters, but this cruise ship hantavirus problem has been lurking in the background for weeks and now it suddenly feels like it has gone from an Atlantic Ocean problem to a global problem.
When opening The Drudge Report this morning and seeing a headline that a rat virus is threatening the entire globe, on one hand it feels overdone and dramatic, but on the other hand it also feels a little bit like deja vu to the early days of COVID.
And don’t forget… we have a World Cup coming here this summer and it’s also the 250th birthday of America, so in the coined phrases of the past there are some pretty major “super spreader” events sitting on the horizon.
Here’s what we know…
There are patients from that cruise ship who have hantavirus, specifically the Andes strain, which reportedly spreads from person to person. Experts at this point say there is not a global threat and that the spread is not necessarily fast and furious like COVID, but viruses mutate and that’s part of the fear here.
Additionally, what at first felt like a quarantined and isolated boat with hantavirus has now become something different. We’ve heard that more than 20 people have reportedly left that boat over the last month and are now on land in different places. One person in Europe is reportedly sick and two people in Georgia are quarantined with no symptoms.
Listen… we’re not doctors and we’re not pretending to be experts. Experts will do what experts do, contact tracing will happen, and countries need to get a grip on something like this before it spreads. Let’s hope and pray it doesn’t spread because “Captain Trips” doesn’t exist… until it does.
The people on this boat are already going through a living hell, but if the planet ever went through that same living hell… we would truly be staring into the abyss.
The hantavirus outbreak has spread to Europe after a passenger who had already left the MV Hondius cruise ship tested positive once back home, authorities announced in an update Wednesday.
Swiss authorities said the man returned home last month following a trip to South America with his wife before testing positive for the virus, which can lie dormant for up to eight weeks.
He went to a Zurich hospital for testing after the cruise operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, emailed recent passengers about the spreading virus that has killed three people and sickened at least five, the World Health Organization said.
The WHO is saying that they have heard from people on the now cursed hantavirus cruise.. they are still saying that a global threat level is low..
pic.twitter.com/gTbK0TIKu1 Hantavirus lo último: La Organización Mundial de la Salud de la ONU (OMS) dice que no se puede descartar la transmisión de persona a persona a bordo de un crucero en el Océano Atlántico, aunque es rara. Siete de 147 pasajeros y tripulantes han caído…
A British Ship Doctor is ‘Among the Sick Patients on the MV Hondius’ After Hantavirus Outbreak Now a passenger on board the cruise ship has claimed that one of the sick crew members is the ship’s doctor…
A suspected hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean has killed three people and sickened at least three others, the World Health Organization said Sunday.
In a statement to The Associated Press, the WHO said an investigation was underway but that at least one case of hantavirus had been confirmed. Hantavirus, found throughout the world, is spread by contact with urine or feces of infected rodents, most often rats or mice.
WHO didn’t identify the vessel, but South African media reports said the outbreak happened on the MV Hondius cruise ship while it was sailing from Argentina to Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa.
The MarineTraffic global shipping website identified the vessel as a Dutch-flagged passenger cruise ship. It located it as docked in Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, on Sunday night.
South African media, quoting South African health department spokesperson Foster Mohale, said the first victim, an elderly man, died on the ship. His wife later died in a South African hospital, Mohale said.
To each their own, cruises are a perfectly valid fair means of vacation. But a part of this thought during and after covid we would kind of sort of learn our lesson when it comes to cruise ships and how they’re just this petri dish floating in an ocean with thousands of people on board sneezing and wheezing coughing and now in this case being infected by the hantavirus ..
For those in tick-prone areas of the United States, people are reporting that something big has changed … more ticks than normal. Reports of ‘boxes of ticks’ being dropped off on farms.. Dogs and people covered from knees down with dozens just from a quick walk in grass..
Numbers now prove that something may be very different this year..
Tick bites are sending Americans to the emergency room at the highest rate in nearly a decade, according to new CDC data.
During the second week of April, 71 out of every 100,000 emergency room visits were for tick bites — more than double the usual average of about 30 per 100,000, said the agency, which said this year’s numbers match data from 2017.
Oh … and on those boxes of tickets?
Well Pfizer is coming out with a LYME DISEASE vaccine and farmers are now finding BOXES OF TICKS ON THEIR LAND😞😞 pic.twitter.com/k71gVebXrK
A once-rare allergy that can cause severe reactions hours after eating red meat is dramatically rising across the United States, according to preliminary findings by researchers at VCU Health and Virginia Commonwealth University.
The condition, known as alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), is typically linked to bites from the lone star tick and is increasingly recognized as a growing health concern in many regions of the country. Different types of ticks cause the syndrome in other parts of the world.
The findings, presented last year at the American College of Gastroenterology’s 2025 annual scientific meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, show a 100-fold increase in positive test results for alpha-gal antibodies between 2013 and 2024. While these results are preliminary, the study represents one of the largest real-world analyses of AGS to date.
This week the Canadian government announced health screenings and quarantine of up to seven days for those coming back from the country.
And in December, Spain told its citizens to stay away from Cuba due to a “serious epidemic”.
Known just as “the virus” to many, reports suggest one third of the Cuba’s population has been infected – and the British Medical Journal described the “surge” as the country’s most serious crisis in recent decades.
MORE…
In areas like Camagüey and Holguín, cemeteries have reportedly been overwhelmed.
Three months after the disease spread across the island, the Cuban government recognised the crisis as an epidemic.
But the regime still refused to declare a national health emergency.
The disease has been called a type of “combined arbovirus” – where people are infected with multiple viruses at the same time and it becomes difficult to diagnosis.
Let’s talk about Rockin’ Richie. If you were one of the folks who followed him on TikTok, you know who I mean. And if not, let me fill you in a bit. Rockin’ Richie wasn’t some guy who set out to be an influencer. He ended up in that role because he was dealing with stage 4 colon cancer and decided to share his journey, his choices, and his struggles with the world. And yeah, a lot of people followed along.
There was controversy wit this social media feed.. Richie talked about alternative treatments.. stuff that wasn’t the usual medical route. He was trying a mix of diet changes, water cleanses, and homeopathic approaches that didn’t have the backing of mainstream medicine. And when he talked about putting GoFundMe money into a trust fund for his daughter, some people got really suspicious. They started accusing him of faking the whole thing just to get money, which was tough to watch unfold.
But here’s the thing, Richie was a real person going through a brutal journey. And yes, it was his body, his choice. He decided to fight cancer his way, even if a lot of people, including doctors and nurses, might have wished he’d gone a more traditional route.
We all sort of went on that experimental path with him by watching his updates. He even did a Livestream a couple of months ago where he went to a doctor in real time, hoping to hear good news that his tumor had shrunk from these alternative treatments. Instead, he got the devastating news that the tumor had grown. It was heartbreaking for everyone watching, but Richie stuck to his chosen path.
On that note, there is also some commentary on us as people who followed him. He wanted to eventually come up with his own book and YouTube channel to talk about how he beat cancer. The doctors of course told him he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. But in the common threads on social media many people who supported him continued supporting his desire to do alternative treatments, which in hindsight perhaps was a seemingly rotten thing to do. He just needed medicine but instead many in his fan base, loyal to the end, was encouraging him to avoid that. Just because it’s social media, doesn’t mean it’s all fake…
Maybe some people think that was foolish, and maybe others respect it as his personal choice. Either way, he fought his fight the way he wanted to, in the end.
Now he’s at peace.. whatever peace means, wherever we go after this life. And I bet deep down, even the people who disagreed with his treatment goals were probably rooting for him, because cancer is something we all wish we could see beaten for good.
So, may Rockin’ Richie rest in peace. We might not all agree on the path he took, but we can respect that he chose to share his journey and fought as hard as he could.
