What troubled times we live in. The world is awash with hatred and violence, Ebola is spreading at an unprecedented rate, and Robin Williams has left.
It struck me this week, what real heroes are. For me, the people we train to kill and send to foreign lands, do not compare with those who risk their lives every day treating people with deadly diseases, in the knowledge that they face an invisible enemy that can kill at any time. Health workers who face such situations in all corners of the earth, do so willingly and with little in the way of remuneration or even thanks. Doctors and nurses will die from ebola and I am sure that the streets will not be lined with flag waving jingoists, if and when their bodies are ever returned.
Ebola is a terrifying disease and at present it is contagious, but we are led to believe that it can be eliminated with soap and water. Most viruses are not so easily dealt with and we can be grateful that it is not infectious as so many diseases are. Contact with an ebola carrier though can easily result in the disease being passed on, and in the African countries where it seems to be spreading, personal hygiene is limited by water supply as much as by custom or tradition. It will, if it has not already done so, spread wider than the African continent, and the more people that become infected, the greater is the risk that the virus will mutate into a form that is infectious. Should that happen, the world faces a threat probably worse than the bubonic plague of the seventeenth century.
Ebola is just one of a number of haemorrhagic diseased that have so far been confined to equatorial regions and are though to have originated in other primate species. The prognosis for an ebola sufferer is pretty bleak, though some people seem to have immunity, while others recover. There is no vaccine as yet, probably because of the rarity of the disease and the huge cost of producing a vaccine.
While this is going on, the Jews are pounding the Palestinians and the Palestinians are killing a few Jews, Muslims are murdering their own people in Iraq and in Syria, and Russia is fuelling a deep conflict that borders on civil war in Croatia, and the Pope continues to pray for world peace.
Such prayers have probably been offered throughout the history of organised religion by people who believe in a higher power. The fact that prayer does not work seems to elude them, and their beliefs are still used as an excuse for the mindless killing of their fellow human beings, all of whom, if a god existed, would be seen as equals. Clearly some are more equal than others.
It struck me this week, what real heroes are. For me, the people we train to kill and send to foreign lands, do not compare with those who risk their lives every day treating people with deadly diseases, in the knowledge that they face an invisible enemy that can kill at any time. Health workers who face such situations in all corners of the earth, do so willingly and with little in the way of remuneration or even thanks. Doctors and nurses will die from ebola and I am sure that the streets will not be lined with flag waving jingoists, if and when their bodies are ever returned.
Ebola is a terrifying disease and at present it is contagious, but we are led to believe that it can be eliminated with soap and water. Most viruses are not so easily dealt with and we can be grateful that it is not infectious as so many diseases are. Contact with an ebola carrier though can easily result in the disease being passed on, and in the African countries where it seems to be spreading, personal hygiene is limited by water supply as much as by custom or tradition. It will, if it has not already done so, spread wider than the African continent, and the more people that become infected, the greater is the risk that the virus will mutate into a form that is infectious. Should that happen, the world faces a threat probably worse than the bubonic plague of the seventeenth century.
Ebola is just one of a number of haemorrhagic diseased that have so far been confined to equatorial regions and are though to have originated in other primate species. The prognosis for an ebola sufferer is pretty bleak, though some people seem to have immunity, while others recover. There is no vaccine as yet, probably because of the rarity of the disease and the huge cost of producing a vaccine.
While this is going on, the Jews are pounding the Palestinians and the Palestinians are killing a few Jews, Muslims are murdering their own people in Iraq and in Syria, and Russia is fuelling a deep conflict that borders on civil war in Croatia, and the Pope continues to pray for world peace.
Such prayers have probably been offered throughout the history of organised religion by people who believe in a higher power. The fact that prayer does not work seems to elude them, and their beliefs are still used as an excuse for the mindless killing of their fellow human beings, all of whom, if a god existed, would be seen as equals. Clearly some are more equal than others.
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