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
And in a town like Mangualu, people are very used to getting these diseases.
And when they do, they typically don't go to the hospital.
In fact, sometimes they don't even go and see a doctor.
Many poor people, they tend to go to traditional healers or they'll go to some local small clinic.
All of that combined means that people in Mongboaloo were really only going to the hospital for medical help when they were approaching the last stages in the disease.
That's right.
And then the other issue the doctors brought up was with testing.
Because it's this very rare strain, initially there wasn't even a test in this entire region for Bundibudjo.
When they first detected what they saw as this mysterious wave of deaths in this town that happened all through the month of April and then into early May, they sent samples off to the regional lab to get it tested and it came back negative for Ebola.
because they were testing for an entirely different strain, the much more common strain, which is called Zaire, and that it was only eventually when health officials sent a sample to the capital, Kinshasa, that they tested it for this rare Bundibugyo strain, and then that came back positive and they identified the disease.
So since the outbreak has started, there's been this chronic shortage of testing kits to identify who's got Budibudjo.
And that just makes treatment at the hospital really hard because the doctors told us that they would send off a test and not get a result for four, five, six days.
Oftentimes, they said by the time the test result came back, the patient was already dead.
Yes, and you'd think that that isolation would prevent the spread of the disease.
But in fact, there are several factors that, in some respects, made this town an ideal place not just for the disease to take off, but also to spread across the region.
So it's this gold mining town that has a huge population of migrant laborers.
And because mining has money, it brings traders, it brings gold smugglers, it brings sex workers.
And these are all people who move in and out of the town as well.
That also, incidentally, has possibly been a factor that provided vectors for the disease to spread elsewhere.
Well, if you speak to people in the aid community, for them, there is no doubt that if USAID and American aid more generally were still in place, that this virus would have been detected sooner than it was.
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