Declan Walsh
speaker
486 appearances
8 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 8 Jul
Declan Walsh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And so by the time we had an explanation for it, which was Ebola, there were already hundreds of cases.
So this community is faced with this tidal wave of deaths
infections and deaths and people are searching for an explanation.
They're going to the hospital too late to get treatment.
By the time they get there, many of them are dying.
And so people in a certain way logically are starting to associate the hospital
as a place where people go not to have their lives saved, but to die.
And so I think that really is partly at the root of some of these wild conspiracy theories that were going around.
But what that meant in practice for the medical staff at the hospital
is that they not only were grappling with this incredibly dangerous disease and chronically under equipped to fight it, but they were also dealing with this intense hostility from the community.
So when we got to Mongboalu, the huge issue was how to deal with the body of this popular pastor who had just died the night before.
His name was Sylvester Atama.
He was this charismatic Catholic preacher in the town who had a pretty big following.
And when we arrived at the hospital, the director told us that his followers had gathered at the gate of the hospital and they were demanding to get his body so that they could bury it in the traditional Congolese fashion.
Now, the hospital director refused because he said that would have been a disaster for the spread of the disease in the town.
Because traditional burial practices in the Congo involve large numbers of mourners touching the body of a deceased person.
And so a funeral can become a super spreader event.
And that, in fact, has been a problem in previous outbreaks.
Okay, makes sense.
But the refusal to give up this body by the director enraged his supporters.
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