> Nearly 200 health facilities have been attacked in the DRC this year, forcing health workers to suspend or delay vaccinations and treatments.
I realize this will sound cold and callous, but we need to stop trying to help. It is clearly not working. Birth rates are unsustainable (6.11 births per woman!), education is practically non-existent and not wanted, ritualistic rape of babies to cure HIV, abduction of children for soldiers... and the list goes on and on.
Probably shouldn't have posted this, I suspect people also feel this way... or maybe it's my false-consensus bias acting up again.
Having said that, as it stands now Ebola isn't much of a threat in the first world. Ebola isn't very contagious in a first world environment and would be dealt with fairly quickly.
For the most part Ebola requires physical contact to spread, even then often requires contact with bodily fluids. It also doesn't last long on surfaces.
First world hygiene and the traditional manner we handle dead bodies (or animals for that matter) and most any hospital could handle basic treatment and a quarantine would be more than sufficient to deal with it.
Question was flagged before I could read it, but based on responses citing the birth rate, the premise of the question might have been along the lines of whether or not it's worth saving lives in areas with high birth rates if we're concerned about overpopulation.
To make it as short as possible: if you're concerned about family sizes, the best path forward is, counterintuitively, improving health and reducing infant mortality, not the opposite. Parents seem to compensate for high infant mortality and high poverty with larger families, but naturally adjust family sizes downward as conditions improve. That trend seems to hold in countries all around the world, dozens of examples so far without counterexamples. (I.e., Malthus was wrong, according to all the data we have.)
But his book is still really worth reading, it bolsters his argument with much more data.
Humanity is actually doing pretty well this time compared to last time at West Africa. This time we have working vaccine and are using it with abandon.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] threadI realize this will sound cold and callous, but we need to stop trying to help. It is clearly not working. Birth rates are unsustainable (6.11 births per woman!), education is practically non-existent and not wanted, ritualistic rape of babies to cure HIV, abduction of children for soldiers... and the list goes on and on.
Probably shouldn't have posted this, I suspect people also feel this way... or maybe it's my false-consensus bias acting up again.
Having said that, as it stands now Ebola isn't much of a threat in the first world. Ebola isn't very contagious in a first world environment and would be dealt with fairly quickly.
First world hygiene and the traditional manner we handle dead bodies (or animals for that matter) and most any hospital could handle basic treatment and a quarantine would be more than sufficient to deal with it.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Hans Rosling provides an exhaustive rebuttal to that question in Factfulness: https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
Here's a speech he gives on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnexjTCBksw
To make it as short as possible: if you're concerned about family sizes, the best path forward is, counterintuitively, improving health and reducing infant mortality, not the opposite. Parents seem to compensate for high infant mortality and high poverty with larger families, but naturally adjust family sizes downward as conditions improve. That trend seems to hold in countries all around the world, dozens of examples so far without counterexamples. (I.e., Malthus was wrong, according to all the data we have.)
But his book is still really worth reading, it bolsters his argument with much more data.