Ebola outbreak and the Friendship Train returns

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.

It’s 10 years since the world’s deadliest outbreak of Ebola started in West Africa. We hear from a survivor and discuss the legacy of the epidemic with the BBC's global health reporter Tulip Mazumdar.

Plus, the first World War Two battalion to be led by an African-American woman. Major Charity Adams’ son tells her story.

We hear about the group of men arrested in Egypt in 2001 at a gay nightclub who became known as the Cairo 52.

We also hear about the avalanche on Mount Everest which killed 16 sherpas carrying supplies 10 years ago.

Finally, the train service between India and Bangladesh that lay dormant for 43 years which rumbled back into life in 2008.

Contributors:

Yusuf Kabba – an Ebola survivor from Sierra Leone Tulip Mazumdar - the BBC's Global Heath reporter. Stanley Earley – son of Major Charity Adams Omer (a pseudonym) - arrested and imprisoned at a gay club in Cairo Lakpa Rita Sherpa - helped recover bodies after the avalanche on Mount Everest in 2014 Dr Azad Chowdhury – on the inaugural Friendship Express

(Photo: Liberian Health Minister Burnice Dahn washes her hands at a holding centre for Ebola patients in 2014. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me
0:08.8	Max Pearson the past brought to life by those who were there. This week a specialist US military unit in the
0:15.4	Second World War of mainly African-American women.
0:18.4	Well you don't really think history when you're doing something. It's not history until after you do it.
0:23.6	If you're going to send nearly a thousand people overseas, you want somebody who has
0:27.0	truth experience.
0:28.0	Plus, a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest that resulted in changed work practices for Sherpers and how Egypt's police
0:35.8	left a lasting impact on a group of arrested gay men known as the Cairo 52.
0:41.6	It has been always hard in Egypt to live as gay man and people do not actually
0:47.4	open that topic at all because it's taboo in the Middle East. That's coming
0:51.0	up later in the podcast but first a moment from the medical history books. West Africa is still feeling the effects of the Ebola epidemic from 2014 to 2016. It was the deadliest outbreak of the disease in history.
1:05.3	Starting in Guinea, it spread to neighbouring countries including Liberia and Sierra Leone.
1:10.5	The epidemic took a heavy toll on the region leaving more than 11,000 people dead.
1:16.0	Dan Hardoon has been speaking to Yusef Kaba, an Ebola survivor from Sierra Leone.
1:22.0	When I entered the ambulance, I was just feeling that finally it is over for me and I am going to die.
1:30.0	I was just crying and the neighbors were as well crying because the whole talk that I'm not going to come back.
1:37.6	When Ebola was discovered in Sierra Leone in May 2014,
1:40.9	the country was still healing from its civil war, which had ended in 2002.
1:46.0	There was panic all over the place, like people were just scared, because we are talking about a where the past 11 years we are just recovering from the war.
1:58.0	So all people we are thinking about by then is another episode of trauma.
2:04.1	As hundreds of people became infected,
2:06.5	the government tried to curb Ebola spread
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -342 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.