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World Focus: Ebola, Human Rights and Poverty Making the Links
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By Alicia Ely Yamin
October 28, 2014 - opendemocracy.net
The catastrophic Ebola crisis unfolding in West Africa offers many lessons, not least for global anti-poverty efforts. These will culminate in a set of targets, to be agreed by the United Nations in 2015, known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
First of all, the crisis should lead to a re-think of the triumphalism that has marked some of the global health debate in recent years, with some projecting a “grand convergence within a generation” between North and South, rich and poor countries, based upon the “end of preventable mortality, including from infectious diseases”.
"It is not a coincidence that, in addition to the legacy of colonial exploitation, and pillaging by their own corrupt and unaccountable governments in recent history, Liberia and Sierra Leone are two countries that have been ravaged by brutal civil wars." Second, neither universal health insurance, without real access to public health as well as effective care, nor cash transfers, without connections to functioning systems, would have thwarted Ebola or the social devastation it is wreaking. Yet both are highly touted solutions to global poverty, and likely to be part of the SDG agenda.
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By Margaret Kimberley
October 14, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“African countries are poor because they have been systematically looted by Europe, the United States and the rest of the capitalist world for centuries.”
The ability to engage in critical thinking seems to be lost on the vast majority of Americans.
When Americans don’t like a president they claim that his mother traveled all the way from Hawaii to Kenya to give birth to him. Others swear that parents in Newtown, Connecticut went along with a government plot and pretended their children were shot to death in school when they are in fact still alive somewhere.
Ebola, now officially known as Ebola virus disease (EVD), has claimed thousands of lives in sporadic outbreaks ever since it was identified in the Congo in 1976. Scientists are unsure of its exact origins but hypothesize that its host is a forest dwelling fruit bat. According to this theory, its bodily fluids can be spread to other animals and then to humans through physical contact.
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