by PRABIR PURKAYASTHA
WHO’s Ebola Response Team and Centre of Disease Control, Atlanta predict that more than a million people are likely to be dead from ebola by January 2015. These are indeed grim figures and far worse than the 10 thousand dead that WHO had estimated only a month earlier while planning its response. While the public health systems in the three most affected states – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – are near collapse, the global response to the epidemic has beendisastrously inadequate.
It is not that ebola itself has undergone any change. It is the response to ebola that has failed and is creating this disaster. Experts predict that unless emergency measures are taken, not only will ebola kill very large numbers, it is also likely to become endemic in Africa.
A quick look at the figures. The number of patients are doubling every 2-4 weeks in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, showing clearly that it is a still rapidly expanding epidemic. The cases reported are also gross underestimates – the actual numbers are at least 2-3 times higher. The CDC calculations show that if action is taken immediately, then the figures of those infected would reach a high of about 3,500 cases per day, start dropping by December, and be nearly zero by end January, next year. If we delay, the intervention by a just month, the figures would rise to 10,000 per day and would take much longer to brought under control. If the intervention is delayed by 2 months, the figures of those infected daily would rise to about 26,000 per day and continue to rise exponentially for quite some time thereafter. With 70% mortality, we are looking at nearly 20,000 dead per day from ebola, a frightening figure. As of now, this is not simply a worst case scenario but a very possible one, as the world seems more concerned with other issues than controlling ebola in some poor West African countries.
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Why did this 25th occurrence of ebola then generate such a disaster? There are two reasons for this. One is the countries themselves – though they have enormous mineral resources, they are very near the bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index. They suffer from the resource curse: they fall prey to the rich and powerful countries and their corporations because of their mineral wealth. They are also countries the worst affected by the neoliberal globalisation in which all public expenditure including public health systems have been cut down drastically. These countries have been destroyed earlier by colonial loot, and thenthe civil wars that were instigated by global capital to secure their mineral wealth. Remember blood diamonds from Sierra Leone and Charles Taylor’s gift of one to Naomi Campbell? While Charles Taylor, the then President of Liberia, was charged with war crimes for trading in blood diamonds, De Beers the diamond monopoly emerged unscathed, in spite of benefitting from the same trade.
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