The interval between the onset of symptoms and death has been 48 hours in the majority of cases, and “that’s what’s really worrying,” Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital, a regional monitoring center, told The Associated Press.

The latest disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo began on Jan. 21, and 419 cases have been recorded including 53 deaths.

According to the WHO’s Africa office, the first outbreak in the town of Boloko began after three children ate a bat and died within 48 hours following hemorrhagic fever symptoms.

  • HughJorgens@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    If you want to stay up for a few nights, read The Hot Zone, which is about Ebola. Those bats are gonna kill us all someday, and there are so many of them!

    • Wahots@pawb.social
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      8 hours ago

      https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51N5u7HMbaL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

      This one will keep you up at night, it was SO fucking interesting. It’s basically a story about a crime fighter who goes in and solves really complex crimes…but all the crimes are weird diseases, like strange brain swelling diseases that are gonna kill a ton of people in the US, and the detective has to figure it out before a bunch of people die.

      We have the technology to solve insane cases, but we are completely hamstrung by mentally deficient politicians like our current idiot and his party. And how we still prevailed despite their obstructions.

    • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 day ago

      It’s not the bat’s fault really. If us humans would stop encroaching further into their territory and stopped warming the planet to the point of no return, we might not be having such extreme issues with zoonotic viruses we’ve never encountered before trying to kill us.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        11 hours ago

        This has nothing to do with climate change that generic area of the world has always beet stock-full of nasty diseases. Even considered by African standards of unlucky geography the Kongo basin is triply fucked.

        • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          It’s the Congo.

          King Leopold was one of history’s greatest monsters. Rubber tree plantations - they’d chop a hand off or worse if you didn’t make quota. (The Heart of Darkness, later retold as Apocalypse Now, later retold as Spec Ops: the Line.)

          The region has been ravaged for the past two centuries. Remember Kony 2012? Those starving children could have been soldiers.

          • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 day ago

            Tbf, even if we gathered all people in one giant city to stop encroaching, bugs would follow us due to our food storage/waste and blood, and bats would follow the yummy bugs and make homes in the structures we make, which like for pigeons are often good for bats too. Bats, rats, and some birds you’ll never be able to really escape by avoiding nature because they follow us or something else that does.

            • AoxoMoxoA@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              I was tripping on shrooms on day, looking at the grass and noticed an ant scurring around then another and little, tiny beetle looking bugs. Then i looked out across a field and saw gnats,bees ,wasps , flys, 20 or 30 birds in the distance , a couple squirrels and thought about the worms under my feet and realized this is their world we just live in it. We are outnumbered a million to one and they don’t need us at all