It’s not your fault if you weren’t aware of this, but Yemen currently is in crisis. A civil war, with lots of foreign actors (Saudi Arabia, for example), have been pummeling the nation. It’s completely fallen apart.
And now, cholera is ravaging the nation too.
I wrote about the cholera epidemic in Haiti---an epidemic entirely preventable, an epidemic lied about by the United Nations (and the US), and an epidemic that’s still killing people. At least 10,000 people died. Despite being a 2 hour flight from Miami, barely raised any headlines in the US. Only Jonathan Katz covered the story with any detail, doggedly. If he had not, we’d probably not even know the full extent and perhaps the UN never would have fessed up.
300,000+ may be infected in Yemen, and a good portion of them will die too.
When Ebola reached parts of West Africa where it’d never been recorded, the world completely panicked. I mean, it’s not hard to see why---with widely read popsci books like The Hot Zone out there, and various apocalyptic movies involving Ebola-like diseases. Ebola is indeed scary—I mean any disease where one melts from the inside out is scary. But it’s not nearly as virulent as cholera (or measles, now reaching epidemic status in parts of Europe thanks to Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy).
But with Cholera, untreated, one can literally shit themselves to death. It’s about as gruesome a way to die as melting from the inside-out due to the viruses in the ebola family. I have to wonder why it doesn’t get the headlines.
Is it because cholera doesn’t always kill all of its victims, while the ebola family of viruses takes the lives of about 70% of the people it infects? In cholera though, about half of those who have no access to treatment—like the people of Yemen---die, and remember, it’s far easier to spread than ebola.
Is it because ebola is still fairly novel (only formally identified in 1976), whilst cholera is old news? Zika, too, garnered huge international headlines for a time there (and while it seems to kill almost no one, it does seem to have a detrimental effect on fetuses, at least in Brazil).
Heck, why doesn’t the plague still get headlines---it’s not only around and epidemic, it’s got reservoirs in the US and has for about a century, not to mention yellow fever, which saw a resurgence in Angola last year. If you know any early US history, you’ll know yellow fever arrived in the US via travelers. Missionaries, on their way home from a trip, spread the disease from port to port. It killed about 10% of Philadelphia. Last year’s outbreak did indeed travel outside of Angola. Few headlines (and thankfully, there’s a vaccine).
If you want to help, Doctors Without Borders has a presence in Yemen, and could use your help if you can.
The Yemen crisis could use far more headlines---since the US is paying for some of it through our proxy, Saudi Arabia.
And why do you think some disease gets huge scary headlines and others do not?