Posted on 10/03/2014 11:24:31 PM PDT by No One Special
MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) — Thomas Eric Duncan rushed to help his 19-year-old neighbor when she began convulsing days after complaining of stomach pain. Everyone assumed her illness was related to her being seven months pregnant.
When no ambulance came, Duncan, Marthalene Williams' parents and several others lifted her into a taxi, and Duncan rode in the front seat as the cab took Williams to the hospital. She later died.
Within weeks, everyone who helped Williams that day was either sick or dead, too — victims of Ebola, the virus that is ravaging Liberia's capital and other parts of West Africa, with more than 3,300 deaths reported.
The disease is spread through direct contact with saliva, sweat, blood and other bodily fluids, and all those who fell ill after helping Williams had touched her. She turned out to have Ebola.
Duncan is now hospitalized in an isolation ward in Texas after falling sick with Ebola following his arrival last month on a family visit. He has become a symbol of how the lethal disease could spread within the U.S.
Here in Liberia, however, he is just another neighbor infected by a virus that is devastating the cluster of tin-roof homes along 72nd SKD Boulevard where Williams lived.
"My pa and four other people took her to the car. Duncan was in the front seat with the driver, and the others were in the back seat with her," recounted her 15-year-old cousin Angela Garway, standing in the courtyard between the homes where they all lived. "He was a good person."
Meanwhile, Liberian authorities Thursday announced plans to prosecute Duncan, saying the delivery driver lied about his Ebola status upon leaving the country.
On an airport screening questionnaire obtained by The Associated Press, Duncan said...
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
That’s sad. I have to admit I couldn’t turn my back on the kid.
How can many be sick? The WHO says that there are 7,000 confirmed cases in West Africa.
With Mercy’s mother dead, neighbors fear it is only a matter of time before she, too, shows signs of the virus, and they want to know which other children may have come into contact with her while she was fetching water.
Pewu Wolobah, a member of the neighborhood anti-Ebola task force, lamented that even as Americans try to trace all of Duncan’s contacts there, the virus is spreading through Duncan’s old neighborhood faster than anyone can keep track.
The aunt of the pregnant victim died on Wednesday after collapsing in her house next door to the Williams home. Her 15-year-old daughter Angela is left behind, along with the pregnant woman’s three younger siblings — Ezo Williams, 16, Tete Williams, 12, and Stanley Williams, 3 — and the family dog.
They told a staff member in a Dallas Hospital they were from Liberia, and they didn’t associate Liberia with Africa. They probably thought it was in the hill country southwest of Waco.
If Ebola virus contamination only by way of bodily fluid, how could many getting sick?
SKD probably stands for Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe, Liberia's military dictator from 1980 to 1990.
Yes of course, but I predict a “martyr” call will be the liberal’s way out. See how compassionate (libs favorite phrase) Duncan was, et etc, and how we need to sacrifice ourselves for the lives of others (after all isn’t that what you CHRISTIANS preach in the first place?), even going so far as to placing our whole country in danger. How selfish of us to want to live when others are dying, etc. The softies among us will succumb to the guilt or even the agreement w/this philosophy I fear.
And, yes this is a very sad situation for the little girl, the others at ground zero and for the people possibly infected by Duncan’s carelessness while knowing he had come in contact with the young woman who had the Ebola virus. So many leaders at the top of many nations are responsible for this cruelty and lack of helping these poor nations through education and modern technologies as they are allowing the terrorist groups to strength.
I hate to say it...but probably five out of ten folks in the US would think Liberia was just west of Austin, Texas. These are the same people who think international travel means going to California.
We have let the tin pot dictators of these hellholes hold these folks for ransom for decades. We even bring them to New York once a year to celebrate their contribution to global gummint. Rats love talking about root causes except they can never seem to get around to the ones THEY actually have wrought. Sending Africans food because they are starving just allows the dictators to seize their source of power at OUR expense. Freedom is the only succor for these folks but the Rats aren’t about to let that truth get around.
Mass psychology and behavior can get quite ugly, I’ve done a little studying on the topic. Plague houses were walled up with survivors, even infants, alive inside during the Black Death in Europe. Whole towns died, others killed anyone trying to enter from outside, trying to prevent “it” from coming there, though they little understood what was going on. They thought it arose from swamps, foul miasmas, wore beak-like “plague doctor” masks filled with aromatic herbs and flowers. It was crazy and drove many to that state themselves. I have no doubt this will, too.
Would Mr. Duncan have been so helpful if he had known his neighbor had Ebola? He certainly didn’t seem to care about anyone he came into contact with on his way to Dallas.
They have basically already put that message out there. I noticed the signal of that very sentiment you have described in an interview with Chris Matthews and one of Obama’s architects of the Affordable Health Care Act. It’s like we, Americans, live in comfort so, we deserve to see how others live in poor nations. That’s not their call to take action to making bias justifications into policies or to manufacture events that they want for specific outcomes. It’s quite easy for them to do because they don’t recognize Christian beliefs so, any thing they consume from their activists; is their gospel. We stole the country from the Indians, we stole Texas from Mexico, we are butchers. We need to pay(sounds like the terrorists, doesn’t it) Israel is wrong..on and on..
It’s astounding. The man’s from Ivory Coast. He just has family in Monrovia. Not making excuses for him, mind you. Just remarking on the state of Journalism.
He wasn’t careless. In all likelihood he knew he likely had it. If he stayed there he knew he would die. He had connections in the US so he used them and now he’s here being taken care of with a much better chance at surviving at no expense to himself.
That’s no accident.
Screw everyone else...
If a person is covered in sweat?
Five out of 10? I don’t think so. We’re not that ignorant, please.
What I do find amazing, and laudable, is that five people tried to help help the pregnant woman who died. I cannot say that if ebola gains a foothold here, I would do the same.
I don’t agree of course with what Duncan did afterward.
I would however happily adopt an Ebola orphan after the quarantine period. Those children currently have have no chance at anything approximating a life.
But isn't it amazing how when we were even more Christian than today we dealt with deadly disease historically with QUARANTINES???
It was the Christian thing to do....stay in your house so you were not the cause of harming others and do not come out until the disease had passed from you home. But then neighbors would bring things like food to your front door to help you survive the isolation period.
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