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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is a Squiz Podcast. We're your shortcut to being informed. Medical professionals in parts of Africa are struggling to bring an outbreak of Ebola under control. The World Health Organization has declared the epidemic a public health emergency of international concern rather than a pandemic, and there's still no vaccine available yet.
So in this Squish Shortcut, we'll get you across what Ebola is, why there's another outbreak, and what's next in the public health response. Squish Shortcuts is the backstory to the big news stories. I'm Alice Dempster.
And I'm Andrew Williams.
Andrew, Ebola has been in the news a lot over the past month. We've spoken about it on Squiz today. But it's because an outbreak in Africa was detected in May. And even though people might have heard of it before, we thought it's a good time to brush up on what we know.
Exactly.
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Chapter 2: What is the current status of the Ebola outbreak?
So this outbreak has spread through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the DRC, as well as into its neighbour, Uganda. Now, so far... There have been more than 550 confirmed cases in the DRC and 19 in Uganda, and more than 100 people have died from the disease. But medical experts say the true number of cases could be much higher because this is all happening in a war zone.
So there are huge challenges in finding and treating people.
And we'll go into that a little bit more later. But first, let's start with the basics about Ebola. One important thing to note, which surprised me, is that it isn't just one virus. It's actually a group of related viruses. But the one at the centre of the current outbreak is called the Bundabugyo strain.
It was first identified in Uganda back in 2007. It's a rarer form of the virus, so there isn't as much known about it as other forms that have caused previous outbreaks. And another thing to know about it is that, say, unlike COVID-19, this isn't a virus that spread through the air.
That's right. So you can't catch it simply by being near someone infected in a crowd or on public transport, for example. It spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who's sick with it or who's died from it.
So that means that family members and healthcare workers tend to be those most at risk. Now, the thing about this virus is that while it mightn't spread that easily, when people do get sick with it, it can be severe. It often starts with a fever, headaches, body aches, and weakness. And as it gets worse, they can start to develop vomiting and diarrhea. Now, without treatment, it can be fatal.
But as we mentioned, finding and treating the people who have fallen sick has been a major challenge with this particular outbreak.
So the virus was first noticed by doctors in a hospital near the city of Bunia in the northeast of the DRC in early May. As I said earlier, there was a cluster of illnesses in health care workers, but initial tests were only for the Zaire strain of the virus and they showed false negatives.
That means that two weeks passed before the virus was confirmed to be the Bundabugyo strain, but by then it had gotten a head start. And for some context, this isn't the first time the world has dealt with Ebola. It was first discovered in the northwest of what was then Zaire and is now the DRC back in 1976. But the biggest outbreak was between 2014 and 2016 in West Africa.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges in controlling the Ebola outbreak?
Yeah, and all of that is with support from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI for short. And something that people might not know is that there's an Australian playing a major role in that.
That would be former Australian Health Department Secretary Jane Halton. She is the chair of the CEPI, and she was in Geneva when the WHO, that's the World Health Organisation, declared the outbreak an international emergency. So the CEPI has committed tens of millions of dollars worldwide to support several vaccine candidates.
They're taking what Holton calls a many shots on goal approach, which is an appropriate phrase to use, given that there's a footballing element to all of this in the news at the moment.
Yeah, very good segue to me. Adding to the international pressure about all of this are concerns over the big crowds at the FIFA Men's World Cup, which kicks off this week. Millions of fans are travelling between countries for that tournament.
Now, there's been some reports worried about this, but infectious disease experts say Ebola itself isn't the biggest worry because the risk of transmission is considered so low. As we said, you need to sort of make contact with bodily fluids, which you would hope is not happening in the crowds of the World Cup.
It's more illnesses like measles, influenza and COVID that are actually considered more of a risk because they're so much easier to spread.
Yeah, so there are other things for authorities to be thinking about. But on Ebola, there's a huge effort underway to stop it from spreading further. Those measures include expanding treatment centres and ramping up lab testing. And nearby countries are also preparing in case it crosses any other borders.
So borders haven't been closed at this point, but in some countries like the US and Canada, travellers from the affected countries are being screened and monitored. But as we said, the biggest risk still very much remains inside the DRC and Uganda.
You've got authorities in very difficult circumstances trying to trace and reach people before it spreads further until, hopefully, a vaccine is approved.
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Chapter 4: What is the Bundabugyo strain of Ebola?
And remember to share this episode with your mates who want to hear the backstory to the big news stories. And don't forget, if you have an idea for a future Squeeze shortcut, we love to hear them. Please flick it through to hello at the squeeze.com.au. Until next time.
G'day, Andrew Williams here. With thanks to Mindaroo Foundation, we're running a special quiz series on the future of AI in Australia. Mindaroo recently brought together a group of experts at Parliament House for a Safe AI Roundtable, and we spoke to some of them, including Peter Lee, a lawyer who's been working in the AI field for years.
I asked him about the risks of AI when it comes to our daily work lives.
I think there's a much more profound threat to all professionals, in fact, all society, which is the impact of this technology on our critical thinking skills. And we're often finding that people are starting to outsource their brains to these tools. I mean... It's been happening for a while. You think about people's inability to navigate when they rely on Google Maps. Yeah, Google Maps.
Don't know where anything is anymore. Other technologies like that. But we're now seeing that play out in professional work as well. And so there's been some recent research done on that which shows there does appear to be a direct correlation. And it's human nature to be a bit lazy and rely on these tools, but just relying blindly on the output
It's dangerous because the underlying large language models can be fraught with bias. They can hallucinate. And so I do think that is a really, you know, that's a big threat to our profession that we need to counter.
And the best way to do that is to treat these tools as sparring partners and also to really understand the best ways to use them and to build in some checks and balances along the way.
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