Ebola may cause nations to collapse into civil war

(NaturalNews) The news regarding the Ebola outbreak that is spreading from West Africa continues to become more and more dire, with some now even predicting that the virus and the chaos that it is creating could find some nations lapsing into civil war.

In fact, the Liberian government has already warned that the country could lapse into civil conflict, as has neighboring Sierra Leone, "if the Ebola epidemic ravaging West Africa is allowed to continue to spread," Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, adding:

Information Minister Lewis Brown said the lack of urgency in the international response risked allowing a breakdown of societies in the region, where the outbreak has claimed almost 3,000 lives.

"Hospitals are struggling, but so too are hotels. Businesses are struggling. If this continues the cost of living will go to the roof. You have an agitated population," Information Minister Lewis Brown told AFP.

"The world cannot wait for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, to slip back into conflict, which could be the result of this slowness in response," he said.

Poor economies, history of civil conflict leaving African governments desperate

Liberia has been hardest hit by the virus. More than 3,000 people have become infected there, and nearly 1,600 of them have died. The spread of the virus has become so bad that healthcare workers are turning people away from treatment centers because they don't have enough beds or staff to care for them.

Sierra Leone, meanwhile, has seen 1,800 people come down with the virus, and of that total, nearly 600 have died. Government officials have said they are dealing with "an overflow of bodies" following a highly controversial lockdown around the nation which helped them discover in excess of 200 additional cases.

In recent days, the World Health Organization has warned that the number of Ebola cases will likely triple to 20,000 by November. Cases will rise by the thousands each week if efforts to curtail the outbreak are not radically increased.

As for Liberia, the country has been recovering from 20 years' worth of ruinous, back-to-back civil conflicts, dating from 1989 to 2003. The wars devastated the country's economy and killed an estimated 250,000 people.

Liberia and Sierra Leone are two of the poorest countries on the planet; populations there live on an average of $1.25 a day. Sierra Leone is still recovering from an 11-year civil war that ended in 2002.

Nearby Guinea, where more than 600 people have died from Ebola, has not experienced civil war but has nevertheless dealt with deadly, violent civil unrest in recent years between rival factions -- supporters of President Alpha Conde and his opponents.

"The effect of Ebola is being seen not just as a public health situation but it is also a political situation. Liberia is just ten years out of our conflict," Brown told AFP.

"We are just in the 11th year since we started rebuilding our capacity to live together. This Ebola is threatening that capacity," he said.

U.S. military document forecasts 'health wars' by 2039

The Liberian government announced in recent days that it needs a four-fold increase in hospital beds -- to 1,000 -- in the capital of Monrovia alone, by the end of October. However, Brown said that the government required 1,000 beds in 10 Ebola treatment facilities across the country "immediately" but did not have the money to fund the expansion.

"That is what is lowering public confidence in this fight (and) as a government, we simply cannot afford for our people to have dwindling confidence in our government to respond," he told AFP.

"That is why we are urging the international community to assist us," he continued. "If the population continues to see... that we are beyond our resource capacity to respond the way we would like to respond, it creates a sense of anxiety which can translate into urgency on the part of the population."

A separate undated document from the U.S. Army's Medical Service Corps forecast that a global pandemic beginning in 2030 would eventually, nine years later, kill more than 400 million people globally.

The document, titled "'Health Wars' Sparked by a Global Pandemic End in a Health Catastrophe," linked the pandemic to the spread of "globalization."

Learn all these details and more at the FREE online Pandemic Preparedness course at www.BioDefense.com

Sources:

http://news.yahoo.com

http://medicalservicecorps.amedd.army.mil [PDF]

http://online.wsj.com

http://science.naturalnews.com