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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So that when it was finally declared as an Ebola outbreak,
you had this sort of surge of frustration about it.
You had a lot of conspiracy theories that began to spread that either people denied that the disease was real or they claimed that it was some sort of concocted conspiracy between
local health workers and even foreign aid workers in order to make money from the outbreak.
But the people who are on the ground are these people who go into the communities, retrieve the bodies and come out.
What was happening particularly in the early weeks of the outbreak is these burial teams would be stoned or insulted or threatened as they went to retrieve these bodies.
We were at hospitals where crowds of people gathered at the gates and they tried to retrieve bodies from the hospital in order to bury them themselves.
And so, you know, it really struck me that, you know, here were these people who are just volunteers there.
You know, they get a sort of a daily stipend for some of the work that they're doing.
But I mean, they're effectively unpaid volunteers and they're just carrying out this incredibly risky work at the forefront of this
outbreak and they're facing a double danger.
They're facing the danger from this disease that as yet doesn't have a vaccine or a cure.
And then they're also facing the danger from their own communities who are sort of taking out their frustrations on them.
Yeah, it was absolutely shocking.
There was a little five-year-old boy called Emmanuel.
His dad was a motorcycle taxi rider in the town, and he had become quite sick over the previous few days.
And then the night before, he started to bleed quite heavily.
And so his father brought him to this
to the local hospital for treatment but at that stage there wasn't even a proper Ebola ward set up in the hospital the hospital was under threat from the community there were soldiers posted at the gate in order to try and keep the staff safe and inside in this ward we found this boy who's been treated just a drip stuck into his arm you know on a on a on a sort of
on a mattress with no covers on it even and just a couple of hours earlier a woman in a bed two beds down who had died from suspected ebola and her body was just lying there and as i said you know the body of a person who is suspected of dying from ebola is is extremely dangerous in terms of spreading it you know things think that was in the early days of the outbreak things have improved since in terms of treatment in that in that particular hospital they now do have an msf treatment center
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