The outbreak of a new strain of the deadly Ebola virus in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and now Nigeria and Senegal has turned west Africa into a battleground between the promise of globalisation and its terrors. [African Union chiefs held an emergency meeting on Monday to hammer out a strategy].
An instance of the promise is a remarkable study published in Science Magazine by four dozen medical professionals active in African epidemiology. Just half a year into the epidemic, they have sequenced 99 Ebola genomes, identified hundreds of mutations and discovered the incident that spread the disease across the border from Guinea into Sierra Leone in late May — the funeral in Guinea of a faith healer who had treated Ebola patients, attended by 13 Sierra Leonean women.
An instance of globalisation’s terrors can be found in the fact that, in the three months since that funeral, five of the report’s Sierra Leonean co-authors have died.
There is no cure for Ebola, a virus that lives in fruit bats and other mammals and spreads easily through the exchange of fluid — blood, sweat, tears, saliva and so on. There have been two-dozen outbreaks since the virus was first discovered in Congo in 1976, but never one like this, in which the death toll exceeds that of all previous episodes combined. At least 3,500 people have contracted the disease and half that number have died. Patients can take up to 21 days to become symptomatic.
Those with the responsibility of addressing Ebola have oscillated between urgency and complacency, panic and cool. The response in Africa has been marked by extraordinary courage, at least among health professionals. These are surely the people best prepared to take precautions against Ebola and yet, hundreds of caregivers have been infected, 120 of them fatally. The dangers of managing this crisis are coming to resemble those at Chernobyl or Fukushima. Health workers are running through gloves, wraps, body suits and alcohol-based hand sanitisers at a rapid clip.
Among the broader public, the response is more desperate, which is reasonable under the circumstances. Patients are avoiding care, figuring that while there may be Ebola in their blood, there is definitely Ebola in the hospitals. There have been militarised roadblocks and heavy-handed attempts to quarantine neighbourhoods with high rates of infection in Sierra Leone and Liberia, leading to confrontations and violence. The worst-affected countries do not have the political infrastructure to deal with such a crisis.
Even so, a view of the virus that sounds oddly Pollyanna-ish has become prevalent in the West. Ebola is not airborne, doctors stress, nor is it bugborne. Infected Americans have been brought back home for medical treatment. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has not called for closing any borders and has even released a poster reading: “Travel to and from Ebola-affected countries is low-risk”. (It is low risk as long as you do not touch anybody who has developed symptoms or use the same bathroom.
Similarly, an online forum in Le Monde stressed that “it is illusory to think that borders can be airtight”. Well, sure it is, but may not imperfect borders help a bit? It is rather like telling the Dutch they are fools to build dykes and levees because no anti-flooding system can keep out every drop of moisture. Injunctions not to panic alternate with emergency proclamations, even in the heart of the same organisation. Joanne Liu, president of the French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, warned that the world is “losing the battle” against Ebola. But Rosa Crestani, who heads the same organisation’s Ebola intervention, said in the forum in Le Monde: “With globalisation, it’s impossible to close the borders. It’s not ‘correct’ and it’s not recommended by the WHO.”
A similar division exists in the private sector. There are companies that have stopped doing business in the worst-hit African countries, notably major airlines, which have discontinued flights. But there are also pharmaceutical companies working confidently on remedies and screening kits. GlaxoSmithKline is soon to begin trials for a vaccine. It is good not to go overboard. Still, one has the sense that the course of treatment is being circumscribed by a reluctance to say anything that would disrupt the project of globalisation. That taboo cannot last. Ebola is too frightening.
In Liberia, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — has used police to restrict the freedom of movement of those in afflicted neighbourhoods. In America, Donald Trump was applauded in certain circles for calling on the US to stop all flights from west Africa. “The United States has enough problems,” he wrote. In the presence of an epidemic, good manners persist only until the threat draws sufficiently near.
— Financial Times
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.
