John McDermott
speaker
167 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 1 Jun
John McDermott’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 — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
There is widespread conflict involving a plethora of militia, including one that has links to Islamic State.
And there is so little trust.
in the state and almost any institution that represents authority.
And this means that when medics are trying to offer help, there's often quite a rational response, which is, well, who are you to say you are helping me?
Who are you to say that you can protect me?
ActionAid NGO did a survey of some of the health areas it works in in Eturi, and it found that a third of people do not believe that Ebola is real.
And I'm also picking up from my sources there that there is a lingering sense from previous Ebola outbreaks that when
people pitch up offering help.
They're perceived to be
trying to feather their own nest, as if the Congolese government or international NGOs are doing it to make money as opposed to help them.
So as well as some of the operational issues that they have to deal with in the province, such as setting up isolation tents, you have this intangible challenge as well, which is building the trust of the local population.
That's right.
The institutional immune system, as I called it, is our protection against
epidemics emerging and then our protection to stop them spreading too far.
And you can think of that system operating in three locations.
There's the field, there's the offices of politicians, and then there's the lab.
So if we start with the field, stopping Ebola at source requires a number of logistical things to happen at the same time.
You need to test and monitor these cases.
You need to have labs that can confirm results as soon as possible.
You need to isolate patients.
Showing 21–40 of 167 · page 2 of 9
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