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While upending climate legislation, Manchin directed over $15 million in federal funding to protected wetlands where the couple owns property.
But while Manchin has sabotaged federal efforts at combating climate change, he has used federal dollars to preserve his own corner of the world. Public records reviewed by The Intercept show that even after Manchin’s decadeslong efforts to upend environmental policy that would undercut the fossil fuel companies funding his political campaigns (and the waste coal industry generating his personal fortune), he and his wife, Gayle Manchin, have directed millions of federal dollars to a small, pristine valley in West Virginia where the couple owns a condo. Hundreds of miles north of the coal communities decimated by the mountaintop removal mining that Manchin fostered in the state, the Manchins’ Canaan Valley residence sits in an unadulterated watershed, surrounded by the Dolly Sods Wilderness, the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, and Blackwater Falls State Park.
The couple purchased the condo in Davis, West Virginia, in 2011, according to the deed. In 2018, Manchin used his spot on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee to secure $7 million to rebuild the visitor center at the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, less than a mile from his condo. In addition to conference rooms, museum-style exhibits, and a bookstore, the new space also houses offices for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which maintains the valley’s natural landscape and stocks the streams that Manchin, an avid trout fisher, wades in.
“Our public lands are what makes West Virginia Wild and Wonderful and I am so proud of everyone who helped take this dream this far,” said Manchin in a 2020 statement following a visit to the center, celebrating the progress made on “conservation and outdoor recreation.” “This wonderful initiative started in 2014 and is a testament to what can happen when the government works as our partner. I look forward to seeing the Visitor Center completed soon and when it’s safe, filled with tourists who come from all over to see the beauty and wildlife in the wonderful Mountain State.”
This year, as he was holding federal climate legislation hostage, Manchin again used his seat on the Appropriations Committee to secure an $8 million earmark to build a new water treatment facility in Canaan Valley as part of an omnibus spending bill. At the same time, his wife was also directing federal funds to the area. Gayle Manchin was appointed by Biden to head the Appalachian Regional Commission last year, a post overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants intended to modernize underdeveloped parts of Appalachia. She recently secured another $25,000 in funding for source water analysis in the valley — where the water system is currently failing to meet capacity — and a $1.2 million “POWER” grant to connect and improve trails in the area.
It would not be the first time that funds approved by the Appalachian Regional Commission chair were tied to the personal investments of the Manchin family. As Sludge reported in March, since assuming leadership of the commission, Gayle Manchin has directed millions of dollars in federal grants to projects tied to her personal investments. This includes a $1.5 million grant to the Appalachian Investors Alliance, whose director, Mike Green, also chairs an investment LLC that Gayle is invested in and sits on the board of a startup that she holds stock in. Gayle also directed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the West Virginia Regional Technology Park Corp., whose treasurer, Jack Rossi, is also the longtime treasurer for Joe Manchin’s campaign committee and leadership PAC.
Neither Joe nor Gayle Manchin responded to a request for comment.
Famous for shooting a hole through President Barack Obama’s climate legislation, Manchin has long espoused contradictory sentiments on conservation. He is an avid hunter and fisher who frequently describes his fondest memories as spending time in nature with his father. He has also vocally supported some of the most environmentally catastrophic fossil fuel extraction projects in the country while launching attacks on the federal government’s ability to pursue environmental regulation as the chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Even before his ascent to the Senate, Manchin lashed out at the Environmental Protection Agency as governor of West Virginia, suing to limit the EPA’s ability to enforce the Clean Water Act against mountaintop removal mining. The 2010 lawsuit was egregious for two reasons: First, parts of the Manchins’ coal empire have been cited for violating the Clean Water Act, leaching metals into the Monongahela watershed and coal ash residue into groundwater. The coal plant that serves as the main purchaser of Manchin coal is estimated to cause nearly $200 million in health costs to nearby residents each year.
More striking is that the very same Clean Water Act that Manchin attacked as governor is the reason the untouched wilds surrounding his Canaan Valley property remain intact. Beginning in the late 1970s and stretching well into the ’90s, a fierce battle raged in Canaan Valley between local residents, who were opposed to the damming of the Blackwater River, and the powerful Allegheny Power System, which was set on building a massive hydroelectric dam that would have flooded the valley, destroyed its unique wetlands, and ended trout fishing in the area.
After decades of uproarious public hearings organized by West Virginia environmentalists, the Army Corps of Engineers blocked the Clean Water Act permit required to build the dam, and in 1994, the Canaan National Wildlife Refuge was established as America’s 500th national wildlife refuge.
Decades before receiving protected status, parts of the wetlands were overlogged in the early 20th century, leading peat to dry out and burn through the winter, much like the climate change-induced permafrost fires ablaze across Siberia. Today the refuge serves as one of the most pristine stretches of preserve in Appalachia; a miraculously preserved ice-age ecosystem described by locals as “a little bit of Canada gone astray.”
But despite its singular beauty, the northern boreal flora clinging to life in Canaan Valley could soon disappear, as rising temperatures position West Virginia as the state most affected by worsening floods.
Dave Scott, an organizer in Manchin’s hometown of Fairmont working with the activist group West Virginia Rising, helped organize a blockade of Manchin’s coal plant and a shutdown of the upcoming congressional baseball game to protest the senator’s refusal to pass critical components of the Democrats’ legislative agenda.
“Canaan Valley is aptly named because it is absolutely just a breathtaking place. For Manchin to go to a place where I find peace, to this protected space, a place that was protected in the spirit of preservation, and siphon off a little piece for himself — it’s disgusting,” Scott said. “He’s turned the rest of a state we used to call ‘almost heaven’ into almost hell. He opened up the mountaintops, the old mine shafts; he opened up the underground strata for more leaching and more fracking. When he became governor, he even tried to change our slogan from ‘Wild and Wonderful’ to ‘Open for Business.’”
“I teach fourth grade in West Virginia, and I can attest to the fact that the children of this state are fighting hard for a life that they haven’t envisioned moving away from. This is a state that does not offer its people many choices. Our No. 1 employer isn’t coal, it’s Walmart, so you’re lucky if you get a job in the extraction industry when our entire state economy runs on desperation,” Scott said. “There are, I believe, 5,000 miles of streams in Appalachia poisoned because of the coal industry. So for Joe to blow up the climate bill, in the face of so many people who have lost access to clean water and a normal life, for him to take pleasure in the beauty of this state is atrocious. He does not represent the future that I’m fighting for, that my students are trying to prepare for, and that my own children hope to one day see.”
Poisoned streams, contaminated air, contaminate drinking water, widespread poverty, mountaintop removal that's uncorrected, crumbling infrastructure, poor economic opportunities and a braindead Senator who takes care of himself, his luxurious yacht and his Maserati.
And they're the first to use infrastructure funding for themselves.
West Virginia: The FUTURE is here. Will you wake up?
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), is arrested outside the U.S. Supreme Court during a protest of the court overturning Roe v. Wade in Washington D.C. on July 19, 2022. (photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: At Least 17 Democratic Lawmakers Arrested Outside Supreme Court
During Abortion Rights Protests
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were among those detained near the Supreme Court.
They were seen chanting "hands off our bodies" and blocking a street before being led away by police.
The protest follows a Supreme Court ruling that ended the nationwide right to abortion.
Vladislav Buryak, right, with his father, Oleg: 'The torture would continue, sometimes for several hours.' (photo: Oleg Buryak)
Vladislav Buryak was kept for 90 days and describes people screaming and a room with bloodstains and soaked bandages
Vladislav Buryak, who was separated from his family on 8 April at a checkpoint while attempting to flee the city of Melitopol, was released after a months-long negotiation between his father, Oleg – a local Ukrainian official – and Russian soldiers, who wanted to exchange Vladislav for an individual of interest to the Russian military.
Vladislav’s vivid account of his time in captivity is a depiction of violent interrogations involving brutal beatings, and confirms other reports of Russian and pro-Russian separatist forces mistreating detainees.
He is one of about 500 cases of civilian hostages whose information has been collected by the Centre for Civil liberties in Ukraine, including several other young people, although the organisation says that total is likely to be the tip of the ice berg.
In an interview with the Guardian, Vladislav described his long ordeal and how he was taken from a convoy of vehicles.
“We’d left Melitopol for Zaporizhzhia at 9am in the morning,” he said, sitting next to his father. “Around 11 o’clock we were stopped at the checkpoint, where Russian soldiers started checking documents.
“They asked me if I’d filmed the checkpoint and demanded I give them my phone. Then found a video from a Ukrainian Telegram which had Russian soldiers on it talking about how they didn’t want to fight.
“That made them angry, and a soldier with a machine gun pointed it at me and said I needed to follow him and took me to the tent where they were ‘filtering’ people who were leaving. That’s when they found out I was the son of a local official and valuable as a hostage.”
Vladislav said he was taken to a location being used as a prison in Vasylivka, where he was kept for more than 40 days in a single cell before being transferred to a hotel for his last month in captivity.
“They had me working washing the floor of the room they used for interrogations, cleaning officers’ rooms and throwing out the trash. The cell where I was kept was a few metres from where they did the interrogations. I could hear people shouting, and when I cleaned the room I could see bloodstains. Because I could move around when I was cleaning cells, I sometimes had the chance to see what had happened to people and they could sometimes talk to me for a minute or so when the guards weren’t watching.”
Vladislav described the room where the interrogations took place: “There was a metal table and two chairs. One was for the person being questioned and the other was for the person taking notes.
“There were bloodstains and soaked bandages. I could hear the questioning too, at least three times week. ‘Do you have weapons? Who else has weapons?’ They were shouting and the people being tortured were yelling really loudly.
“People were being beaten up and tortured with electric shocks. If someone didn’t say something, the torture would continue, sometimes for several hours.”
“I saw people afterwards as well, and their faces were bruised. I was really scared that they would beat me up as well, so I tried to keep myself emotionless. No one ever told me why they were keeping me but I guessed that it was to exchange me.”
While Vladislav was being held, his father was negotiating with the Russians to try to secure his son’s release.
“They first called me the day after Vladislav was taken on 9 April,” Oleg said. “I was told: ‘I’ve got your son.’ They said: ‘I need this person to exchange.’ It was clear he was a hostage. But I also understood that he was valuable to them and so they probably weren’t going to harm him.
“I couldn’t argue with them and say: he is a child! There was no room for debate. By 4 July they’d made it clear he could be released if this individual was released. In all the 90 days I only managed to speak to Vladislav six times, and even then we knew that Russians were listening.”
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The Buryak family’s account confirms other reports of torture, including a report by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe [OSCE] that said it had found credible evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Russian forces during the invasion of Ukraine, including “signs of torture and ill-treatment on the corpses of killed civilians … show[ing] disregard of the principle of humanity that should guide the application of international humanitarian law.”
The report added: “Some of the most serious violations include targeted killing of civilians, including journalists, human rights defenders, or local mayors; unlawful detentions, abductions and enforced disappearances of such persons; large-scale deportations of Ukrainian civilians to Russia; various forms of mistreatment, including torture, inflicted on detained civilians and prisoners of war; the failure to respect fair trial guarantees; and the imposition of the death penalty.”
The report also documented the discovery of a “series of torture chambers separated by concrete walls” at a summer camp in Bucha, outside Kyiv, including a room it said appeared to be used for executions, with bullet holes in the walls. In another room, where experts said there was evidence of torture and waterboarding, five dead men were found “covered with burns, bruises, and lacerations”.
Chairman Bennie G. Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney listen as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing on July 12. (photo: Demetrius Freeman/WP)
Also, the National Archives on Tuesday sought more information on “the potential unauthorized deletion” of agency text messages. The U.S. government’s chief record-keeper asked the Secret Service to report back to the Archives within 30 days about the deletion of any records, including describing what was purged and the circumstances of how the documentation was lost.
The law enforcement agency, whose agents have been embroiled in the Jan. 6 investigation because of their role shadowing and planning President Donald Trump’s movements that day, is expected to share this conclusion with the Jan. 6 committee in response to its Friday subpoena for texts and other records.
The agency, which made this determination after reviewing its communication databases over the past four days, will provide thousands of records, but nearly all of them have been shared previously with an agency watchdog and congressional committees, the senior official said. None is expected to shed new light on the key matters the committee is probing, including whether Trump attacked a Secret Service agent, an account a senior White House aide described to the Jan. 6 committee.
Many of its agents’ cellphone texts were permanently purged starting in mid-January 2021 and Secret Service officials said it was the result of an agencywide reset of staff telephones and replacement that it began planning months earlier. Secret Service agents, many of whom protect the president, vice president and other senior government leaders, were instructed to upload any old text messages involving government business to an internal agency drive before the reset, the senior official said, but many agents appear not to have done so.
The result is that potentially valuable evidence — the real-time communications and reactions of agents who interacted directly with Trump or helped coordinate his plans before and during Jan. 6 — is unlikely to ever be recovered, two people familiar with the Secret Service communications system said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters without agency authorization.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion into the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters issued a subpoena to the U.S. Secret Service on Friday requesting phone, after-action reports and other records relating to that time.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General upended the committee’s investigation last week claiming the Secret Service had erased texts from around Jan. 5 and 6 after his office had requested them as part of his own investigation.
DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee, briefed members of the House select committee on Friday after sending a letter to lawmakers last week informing them that the text messages were missing. He also said DHS officials were delaying turning over information he requested, which Homeland Security officials have denied.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi has said that the agency did not maliciously delete text messages and that the Secret Service had lost some data because of a previously planned agencywide replacement of staff telephones. The replacement began a month before the Office of Inspector General made his request, he said last week.
Guglielmi acknowledged that some data on the phones had been lost in the changeover but emphasized that “none of the texts” the OIG was seeking were missing.
Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) signaled that the subpoena could resolve the discrepancies in the accounts between the OIG and the Secret Service, which falls under DHS.
The text messages could provide the committee with more details about the actions of Secret Service agents and of the former president around the time of the attack on the Capitol.
Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified during a hearing last month that Trump wanted to lead the mob from the Ellipse to the Capitol, despite knowing they were armed, and said that she was told by an agent that Trump physically assailed the Secret Service agent who informed him he could not go to the Capitol. She did not witness that alleged episode.
The Secret Service’s text messages have become a new focal point of Congress’s investigation of Jan. 6, as they could provide insight into the agency’s actions on the day of the insurrection and possibly those of Trump. A former White House aide last month told the House select committee investigating the assault on the Capitol that Trump was alerted by the Secret Service on the morning of Jan. 6 that his supporters were armed but insisted they be allowed to enter his rally on the Ellipse with their weapons.
Trump told multiple White House aides that he wanted to lead the crowd to the Capitol and indicated his supporters were right to chant about hanging Vice President Mike Pence, all pieces of evidence that help describe his state of mind and what he wanted to happen at the Capitol that day.
Mementos decorate a makeshift memorial to the victims of a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on June 30, 2022. (photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images)
These preventable failures cost Uvalde students and teachers their lives.
A 77-page report by a Texas House investigative committee published on Sunday doesn’t point fingers at any one person aside from the shooter. But it did find “systemic failures” and “egregiously poor decision making,” based on the accounts of 35 witnesses and thousands of documents.
The report shows there were early signs that the shooter was planning to commit violence, that the school was unprepared in basic ways for the possibility of a shooting, and that police failed to act quickly enough or in accordance with their active shooter training to neutralize the attack. And it provides evidence for some of the policy solutions often backed by experts — including early intervention programs and certain security measures to block shooters’ access to schools and classrooms — and evidence for what doesn’t work, including “good guys with guns.”
Here are some key takeaways from the report, and policies that could prevent similar errors in the future:
1) Early intervention might have stopped the shooter
Though the shooter didn’t have a criminal history and had never been arrested, there were warning signs that suggested he was struggling and, later, that he presented an imminent danger to himself and others. We’ll never know whether early intervention might have stopped the shooting from happening. But the report paints a clear picture of someone with a troubled childhood who was widely suspected of having violent ambitions in the months leading up to the attack.
The shooter consistently had poor performance in school, suffered from a speech impediment for which he never received any special education services, and was bullied starting as early as the fourth grade. Beginning in 2018, he started logging more than 100 absences annually and had “failing grades and increasingly dismal performance on standardized and end-of-course exams,” according to the report. It’s not clear whether any school resource officers ever visited his home in an effort to bring him back to school. He didn’t have much of a disciplinary history but was suspended on one occasion for “mutual combat” with another student in late 2018. As a result, Uvalde High School forced him to withdraw before he could complete 10th grade.
After that, he struggled to keep a job, getting fired from positions at Whataburger and Wendy’s, and became increasingly isolated. His mother’s ex-boyfriend described him as a “loner who punched holes in the walls of his room after arguments with her.” His ex-girlfriend recounted how he was teased by friends who called him a “school shooter” and how he told her that he wouldn’t live past 18, either because he would commit suicide or because he “wouldn’t live long.” He started telling friends and online acquaintances that he was planning something in May 2022 that would put him “all over the news,” and that led to speculation that he would “shoot up a school or something” or commit “mass murder.” He asked at least two different people to buy guns for him before he was legally permitted to do so, but they refused.
There are several policies that could have provided school officials and members of the Uvalde community with the tools to identify the shooter as a threat and keep him from obtaining deadly weapons. As government studies have shown time and time again, the most effective means of preventing school violence is early behavioral intervention. That’s why gun control advocates have supported threat assessment programs in schools, which can involve establishing tip lines that allow community members to share concerns, training students on warning signs and encouraging them to report potentially violent behavior, and monitoring social media. Schools also need to ensure that at-risk students can access mental health services, including school psychologists, school social workers, school nurses, and school counselors.
The success of threat assessment programs is well-documented. Several studies have found that 0.5 to 3.5 percent of students at schools with such programs have carried out a threat of violence or attempted to do so, and none of those threats are serious threats to kill, shoot, or seriously injure someone. They also have fewer expulsions and suspensions, events that have proven to incite some school shooters.
Another potential preventative solution is red flag laws, or extreme risk laws, that temporarily prevent people who have been found by a court to pose a risk to themselves or others from obtaining a gun. Texas doesn’t currently have a red flag law, but 19 other states — mostly controlled by Democrats, with the exceptions of Florida and Indiana — have adopted such laws. Research has suggested that red flag laws can prevent mass shootings, given that about half of mass shooters tell someone about their plans in advance and exhibit warning signs, such as agitation, abusive behavior, depression, mood swings, an inability to perform daily tasks, and paranoia. Congress’s bipartisan gun control law passed last month allocates $750 million to incentivize states to adopt these laws.
2) The school had a critical security flaw
There’s only so much that schools can do to defend against a determined individual with access to guns. Militarizing public schools doesn’t foster a welcoming learning environment, nor is it particularly cost-effective for taxpayers.
“Installing bulletproof glass in all the windows — stuff like this is hideously expensive and not sensible. There’s only so far you can go to harden a public facility,” said Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.
But a simple security upgrade could have made it harder for the shooter to enter the school: ensuring that the doors were locked. There were three exterior doors in the west building where the shooting took place, and all three had been left unlocked, according to the report. The door to one of the classrooms where the shooter took his victims was also known to have a faulty lock, but no one had created a work order to repair it. School staff also frequently propped doors open, especially for substitute teachers who didn’t have their own keys.
The attacker in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was also able to enter school grounds through an unlocked gate and then enter the school through an unlocked door.
As an additional security measure, schools can install doors that lock from the inside, so that teachers don’t have to leave the classroom to lock the door and potentially expose themselves and their students to danger. It also makes it easier for law enforcement to neutralize the threat, so that it’s harder for a shooter to barricade themselves in a classroom. In both the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, teachers had to leave the classroom to lock their doors while the shooters were active.
According to a 2020 survey by the National Center on Education Statistics, one in four US public schools do not have classroom doors with internal locks. An even larger share of Texas schools — 36 percent — don’t have that feature, according to a 2018 survey by Gov. Greg Abbott’s office.
3) Hundreds of “good guys with guns” couldn’t stop the shooter
A total of 376 law enforcement officers — including members of Uvalde police, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and a special unit of the US Border Patrol — arrived at the school, according to the report. They still didn’t breach the classroom and neutralize the shooter for more than an hour.
Based on their active shooter training, they should have acted as quickly as possible to “stop the killing.” That’s because most deaths in mass shootings happen within the first few minutes of an attack.
But law enforcement didn’t act quickly enough in Uvalde and that’s partly because of a tragic, bureaucratic error: No officer stepped forward to assume command. The report said it should have been Uvalde police chief Pete Arredondo, since he was the highest-ranked officer present when he arrived on the scene. But any law enforcement officer can take command, no matter their rank, and they are required to do so as part of their training, according to the report. Officers who were outside the school might not have done so because they were getting bad information on what was happening inside, being told that Arredondo was inside a room with the attacker and actively negotiating.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Republicans and gun rights advocates, including the National Rifle Association, argued that it was evidence more armed guards are needed in schools. That’s part of a pervasive idea that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But a 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present.
And even when there were hundreds of law enforcement officers present in Uvalde, it wasn’t enough to stop one “bad guy with a gun” who, according to the report, likely hadn’t ever previously shot a gun in his life.
“The ‘good guy with a gun theory’ is a myth. It bears essentially no relationship to how people behave in the real world,” Spitzer said.
Epidemiologist Luke Nyakarahuka sprays disinfectant on scientists Jonathan Towner and Brian Amman in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda, in 2018. The scientists were researching how bats transmit the Marburg virus to humans. (photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/WP)
Two unrelated people died after testing positive for Marburg in the southern Ashanti region of the country, the WHO said Sunday, confirming lab results from Ghana’s health service. The highly infectious disease is similar to Ebola and has no vaccine.
Health officials in the country say they are working to isolate close contacts and mitigate the spread of the virus, and the WHO is marshaling resources and sending specialists to the country.
“Health authorities have responded swiftly, getting a head start preparing for a possible outbreak. This is good because without immediate and decisive action, Marburg can easily get out of hand,” said the WHO’s regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti.
Fatality rates from the disease can reach nearly 90 percent, according to the WHO.
Here’s what we know about the virus:
What is the Marburg virus?
Marburg is a rare but highly infectious viral hemorrhagic fever and is in the same family as Ebola, a better-known virus that has plagued West Africa for years.
The Marburg virus is a “genetically unique zoonotic … RNA virus of the filovirus family,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The six species of Ebola virus are the only other known members of the filovirus family.”
Fatality rates range from 24 percent to 88 percent, according to the WHO, depending on the virus strain and quality of case management.
Marburg has probably been transmitted to people from African fruit bats as a result of prolonged exposure from people working in mines and caves that have Rousettus bat colonies. It is not an airborne disease.
Once someone is infected, the virus can spread easily between humans through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people such as blood, saliva or urine, as well as on surfaces and materials. Relatives and health workers remain most vulnerable alongside patients, and bodies can remain contagious at burial.
The first cases of the virus were identified in Europe in 1967. Two large outbreaks in Marburg and Frankfurt in Germany, and in Belgrade, Serbia, led to the initial recognition of the disease. At least seven deaths were reported in that outbreak, with the first people infected having been exposed to Ugandan imported African green monkeys or their tissue while conducting lab research, the CDC said.
Where has Marburg been detected?
The Ghana cases are only the second time Marburg has been detected in West Africa. The first reported case in the region was in Guinea last year. The virus can spread quickly. More than 90 contacts, including health workers and community members, are being monitored in Ghana. The WHO said it has also reached out to neighboring high-risk countries to put them on alert.
Cases of Marburg have previously been reported elsewhere in Africa, including in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The largest outbreak killed more than 200 people in Angola in 2005.
The virus is not known to be native to other continents, such as North America, and the CDC says cases outside Africa are “infrequent.” In 2008, however, a Dutch woman died of Marburg disease after visiting Uganda. An American tourist also contracted the disease after a Uganda trip in 2008 but recovered. Both travelers had visited a well-known cave inhabited by fruit bats in a national park.
What are the symptoms?
The illness begins “abruptly,” according to the WHO, with a high fever, severe headache and malaise. Muscle aches and cramping pains are also common features.
In Ghana, the two unrelated individuals who died experienced symptoms such as diarrhea, fever, nausea and vomiting. One case was a 26-year-old man who checked into a hospital on June 26 and died a day later. The second was a 51-year-old man who went to a hospital on June 28 and died the same day, the WHO said.
In fatal cases, death usually occurs between eight and nine days after onset of the disease and is preceded by severe blood loss and hemorrhaging, and multi-organ dysfunction.
The CDC has also noted that around day five, a non-itchy rash on the chest, back or stomach may occur. Clinical diagnosis of Marburg “can be difficult,” it says, with many of the symptoms similar to other infectious diseases such as malaria or typhoid fever.
Can Marburg be treated?
There are no vaccines or antiviral treatments approved to treat the Marburg virus.
However, supportive care can improve survival rates such as rehydration with oral or intravenous fluids, maintaining oxygen levels, using drug therapies and treating specific symptoms as they arise. Some health experts say drugs similar to those used for Ebola could be effective.
Some “experimental treatments” for Marburg have been tested in animals but have never been tried in humans, the CDC said.
Virus samples collected from patients to study are an “extreme biohazard risk,” the WHO says, and laboratory testing should be conducted under “maximum biological containment conditions.”
Anything else to know?
The WHO said this week it is supporting a “joint national investigative team” in Ghana and deploying its own experts to the country. It is also sending personal protective equipment, bolstering disease surveillance and tracing contacts in response to the handful of cases.
More details are likely to be shared at a WHO Africa online briefing scheduled for Thursday.
“It is a worry that the geographical range of this viral infection appears to have spread. This is a very serious infection with a high mortality rate,” international public health expert and professor Jimmy Whitworth of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told The Washington Post on Monday.
“It is important to try to understand how the virus got into the human population to cause this outbreak and to stop any further cases. At present, the risk of spread of the outbreak outside of Ashanti region of Ghana is very low,” he added.
Locals ride an elephant through the small community of Baghmara in the buffer zone of Chitwan National Park. (photo: Jonas Gratzer/Mongabay)
The lethal combination of poaching for ivory, destruction of habitat and conflict with humans has now pushed Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) into the endangered category on the IUCN Red List.
Of all the threats to the species’ survival, human-elephant conflict is seen as the most devastating. In Nepal alone, nearly 50 elephants have been killed in the span of 20 years in retaliation for eating farmers’ crops.
Ashok Ram, a 30-year veteran of Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, has explored the root causes of human-elephant conflict and ways to address them. Ram, who recently completed his Ph.D. on the issue from Wildlife Institute of India, conducted extensive studies on how elephant habitat has been fragmented since the 1930s, and reviewed all cases of human casualties involving elephants in Nepal’s entire southern region.
Mongabay’s Abhaya Raj Joshi met Ram in Kathmandu recently to talk about his work, the threats elephants face in Nepal, and the way forward for the conservation of the species. The following interview has been translated from Nepali and edited for clarity.
Mongabay: Why did you decide to study elephants?
Ashok Ram: There are several reasons for that. Firstly, I have always been interested in big animals. As part of my bachelor’s thesis, I had looked at the impact of Mikania micrantha [an invasive plant species] on the greater one-horned rhinos [Rhinoceros unicornis]. Elephants caught my attention as they face an unprecedented crisis. As their numbers were rapidly declining, they were being killed for their ivory and they were also being electrocuted as a result of human-elephant conflict. Human casualties were also growing. I thought that this animal could go extinct if we don’t take appropriate steps to conserve it. Studying it in detail could be the first step toward its conservation.
Mongabay: Could you please briefly outline the scope and area of your research?
Ashok Ram: My research project was a bit ambitious. I decided to cover the entire 1,200-kilometer [about 750-mile] length of Nepal’s southern boundary. But as I knew that this would turn out to be a benchmark for other studies in the future, I decided to take on the challenge. I mainly looked at three aspects of human-elephant interactions. The first one was to assess how the habitat of elephants has changed over the past century. The second one was to analyze the root cause of human casualties in cases involving conflict with elephants and the third was to assess cases where elephants had died due to anthropogenic causes.
Mongabay: Let’s start with the changes in elephant habitat in Nepal. What were some of your findings?
Ashok Ram: Let me first tell you about how we went about studying the changes in habitat. We looked at forest cover maps obtained through multiple sources such as topographic maps and Landsat satellite images from 1930, 1975, 2000 and 2020 to compare how forest cover had changed during the periods in elephant range areas in the countries.
The images we saw corresponded with Nepal’s economic and political history. During the 1930s we saw dense continuous forests in Nepal’s plains. By 1975, large swaths of forests had been cleared for resettlement of poverty-stricken people from the hills. The government’s policy then was to resettle people from the hills, where agriculture was difficult, in the fertile plains where growing food to survive was comparatively easy. The images from 2020 show massive urbanization and concretization of land which was once covered with forests.
The elephants’ habitat, which spanned 30,000 square kilometers [11,600 square miles] in the 1930s, is now down to less than 19,000 km2 [7,300 mi2].
After collaring eight elephants to assess their home range, we found that an elephant roams an area of around 282-387 km2 [109-149 mi2]. One of the elephants we collared has an extended raise of 1,400 km2 [540 mi2]. This means that they have a relatively large home range compared to other species, and that they travel long distances in search of food. When their range is fragmented, they can’t move through their historical routes, and that increases instances of conflict with humans.
The development of roads and unplanned settlements has already halted the movement of big herds. Proposed railways and airports in the southern belt stand to aggravate the situation further. But loner male elephants still continue to move long distances, and most of them are involved in human-elephant conflict.
Mongabay: Now let’s move on to the elephant conflicts with human casualties.
Ashok Ram: In cases with human casualties, we saw that the deaths were a result of human activity. Similarly, most of the incidents take place outside protected areas. Records show that 274 people have died in the last 20 years as a result of human-elephant conflict.
We noticed an interesting pattern in the cases. Most of the cases in the jungle took place between 3:30 p.m. and 5 p.m., when elephants living in the jungle come out in search of food in evening — the same time people go into the jungle for various reasons such as collecting fodder and wild food. That’s when humans and elephants encounter each other. Later in the evening, people are back in their villages and are done with dinner by 7 p.m. That’s when elephants enter the village. People are agitated and they run about without giving it much thought and many people die in the process. If someone is intoxicated, then they lose sense of what is going on and become more vulnerable. People who hurl firecrackers at elephants are also likely to die as they don’t have sufficient time to run away. We also came across cases where people have been killed trying to take selfies with wild elephants.
Elephants are very good at identifying people who mean them harm. If an elephant wants you dead, you won’t survive. An incident that took place near the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve in eastern Nepal is a case in point. A group of men were playing cards on a watchtower when a wild elephant approached them. One of the men, who habitually scolded the elephant, yelled at it again. The elephant attacked the watchtower and when the man fell down, it trampled him to death, but didn’t harm the others. Later when the man was buried, the elephant returned to the graveyard and attacked his body again.
Mongabay: What about incidents in which elephants are killed?
Ashok Ram: The major cause of death of wild elephants is electrocution. In the last 20 years, 44 elephants have been electrocuted in the country. Farmers, fed up of elephants eating their crops, fence their farms and houses with live wire that kills not just elephants, but humans as well. Just recently two elephants were electrocuted in Jhapa in eastern Nepal. Twelve people have been electrocuted in 15 years after they came in contact with wires set up to deter wild animals.
Mongabay: What kind of elephants are more likely to be involved in human-elephant conflict?
Ashok Ram: As I told you earlier, the loner male elephants travel long distances. Most of the elephants involved in conflict belong to this category. Elephants are very social animals. They move in herds often led by the matriarch. When an elephant reaches its “teenage” phase, it becomes unruly and doesn’t obey the matriarch. That’s when the matriarch expels the male elephant from the group. They become sort of outcasts and become problematic as their hormones rage. Such outcasts move around alone and later join herds where the male bull is no longer strong enough to breed. They become quiet after they reach around 35.
During our study, we found that of the 227 elephants in the country, seven to eight could be classified as conflict-prone bulls. As elephants need hundreds of kilos of food every day, they move long distances, eating almost everything that comes in their way. When they come across food crops, they eat them as they are a good source of energy and provide a good change of taste.
Mongabay: What are the implications of your study for elephant conservation in Nepal and beyond?
Ashok Ram: Conserving elephants requires a lot of planning and resources. This is something only the governments can do. It is unfortunate that we still don’t have landscape-level programs for this. We have already estimated the number of elephants, identified their movement corridors and assessed the causes of conflicts. Now the next step is to implement what we know.
The population of elephants is increasing as they are finding refuge in protected areas such as Chitwan and Bardiya national parks. Herds from Assam in India are also coming to eastern Nepal. But due to fragmentation of their habitat, elephants are being spotted in areas where they were not found in the past.
This means that we need to facilitate the movement of elephants through their historical routes. This could be done by preparing guiding fences, and developing corridors around 1-1.5 km [0.6-0.9 mi) across their range for their movement. Such corridors and guiding fences have proven their effectiveness in Sri Lanka and India. In addition to this, we need to raise awareness among the people about the importance of conserving elephants and their behavior. The government also needs to provide immediate relief to families of people who die in conflict and compensation to farmers who suffer losses due to elephants.
Mongabay: What about cooperation between India and Nepal?
Ashok Ram: We need a landscape-level approach to save the elephants, just as we have one for tigers. We have seen that elephants from Assam in India come to eastern Nepal regularly. Similarly, elephants from areas such as Katarniaghat [Wildlife Sanctuary], Pilbhit [Tiger Reserve] and Dudhwa [Tiger Reserve] regularly come into Nepal. The elephants from the Chitwan-Parsa complex in also go to India. Interestingly, in India, elephants that run into trouble are termed as “Nepali elephants,” and in Nepal, they are called “Indian elephants.” This shows a lack of awareness among people about what’s going on at the landscape level. We need transboundary efforts to ensure their right to movement. Elephants have been living in this landscape for longer than we humans have, we need to understand that.
Mongabay: Solar-powered electric fencing has been a contentious issue between Nepal and India in the past few years. The Indians say that due to these fences, the elephants’ traditional routes have been blocked and they cause trouble in India.
Ashok Ram: We saw that the solar-powered fencing worked for some time. But it too has its limitations. People living near both sides of the border are involved in a lot of formal and informal exchanges. These fences hinder such movements and people inevitably bring down these fences. It’s not that the elephants can’t pass through these fences, they are just afraid that their young ones will get hurt. Our experience shows that such fences don’t work. An alternative approach could be to fence communities and settlements instead, so that the elephants don’t cause harm to houses.
Mongabay: What about “privately owned” elephants?
Ashok Ram: Historically, baby elephants were captured and domesticated. They were sold for money and even offered to rulers as gifts and used in various wars. The government now owns a few hundred of these elephants and the private sector owns some more. That these elephants require tons of food every day to survive makes it difficult for their upkeep. Until recently, these elephants were used in tourism safaris as tourists enjoyed riding on their back. But awareness that this practice hurts the animals led to a decline in tourists who would want to do that. Similarly, due to the COVID-19 situation, tourists stopped coming and suddenly these elephants had nothing to do. The owners also can’t feed them properly as they are not allowed to range inside protected areas.
Some conservationists advocate for a sanctuary-based model for these elephants to retire to. But in my opinion, that’s not possible as these animals would require truckloads of food every day. I think the government needs to allow these elephants to look for food inside protected areas and then take action against those involved in the illegal trade.
Banner Image: An elephant roams the jungle in southern Nepal. Image courtesy of Ashok Ram
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Citations:
Ram, A. K., Yadav, N. K., Subedi, N., Pandav, B., Mondol, S., Khanal, B., … Lamichhane, B. R. (2022). Landscape predictors of human elephant conflicts in Chure Terai Madhesh Landscape of Nepal. Environmental Challenges, 7, 100458. doi:10.1016/j.envc.2022.100458
Ram, A. K., Yadav, N. K., Kandel, P. N., Mondol, S., Pandav, B., Natarajan, L., … Lamichhane, B. R. (2021). Tracking forest loss and fragmentation between 1930 and 2020 in Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) range in Nepal. Scientific Reports, 11(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-021-98327-8
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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