The risk from Ebola is greater than it seems. Not only is it out of control in Africa, there is no reasonable chance it will be brought under control in Africa: it will have to burn itself out. This is because the countries simply do not have the administrative capacity to handle it: not enough beds, nurses, isolation suits, money, etc… The best plan I’ve seen for helping them is Vinay Gupta’s suggestion to use survivors are the primary care givers in community centers. (Note that community centers not run by survivors would likely increase the spread of Ebola, not decrease it.)
Fundamentally, however, the decision point for handling Ebola properly passed in the 70s and 80s, when neo-liberalism, the IMF and Western bankers conspired to reduce the growth rate of Africa from its post-colonial high to below its population growth rate. The governments in question do not have the capacity to handle Ebola, and no one is going to send over enough nurses, doctors and equipment to make a difference. Even if they did, the administrative problems of these countries, lack of infrastructure and distrust in Western medicine mean they would be less effective than you think.
Poor people with inadequate health care, nutrition and sanitation are resevoirs for disease to develop. They always have been. Attempts to explain this to the rich, both the global rich, and the American rich, have been in vain for the past half century or so. What happens in Africa, or India, can come back and kill you, just like what happens in the Middle East (half a million dead kids, and so on) can turn out to be very bad for Manhattan.
So much for Africa. But other nations are at risk as well. The widespread waves of austerity and the destruction of countries have left gaping holes in the medical infrastructure of the first world. Does anyone think Greece, for example, could handle Ebola? Spain already fumbled a case, leaving a nurse who said she probably had Ebola in a public waiting room for hours, while she was symptomatic.
Austerity, cheapness and incompetence kills. America has about 40 million uninsured. The initial symptoms of Ebola look a lot like the flu. Think about what most uninsured are going to do if they get a bad flu? Best case is a trip to the clinic to get some antibiotics. The same is true of many insured. Going to the hospital for a bad case of the flu is overkill, and hospital stays are expensive. Bankruptingly so.
And imagine you are poor, uninsured and have no paid vacation days, then come down what looks like a bad flu? I imagine you might still go wipe old people’s bums, or clean rich people’s houses, or go to work in retail. Sure, soon enough you’ll be too sick to continue, but for a few hours…
Many other countries are in no position to do the sort of contact tracking that is required to stop something like Ebola. Think of Mexico, America’s southern neighbor. Entire cities, indeed provinces, are beyond the writ of the government, essentially controlled by drug gangs.
I don’t see Ebola as an existential threat unless it mutates. It’s still fairly hard to pass it to another person; it isn’t communicable when it’s asymptomatic, and so on. But if it goes airborne, or if it becomes communicable during the incubation phase, it could turn into something truly horrible. And the more people who get it, the more likely a mutation is to occur.
There are some threats where we’re all in it together. Money and position may buy us some immunity, but they cannot buy us total immunity. Climate change is one of those threats; another is communicable diseases. We can only, so far, be grateful that this isn’t the super-flu many scientists have been worried about. Ebola may kill in a particularly nasty fashion, but the last great Flu Epidemic killed more people than World War I.
In the meantime, my sympathies go out to West Africans, who will largely suffer this without meaningful help. And I warn the Europeans that they are far more vulnerable than they think: the lack of internal borders, the near-failed or failed (Greece) States and austerity means that if Ebola gets a foothold it may be far harder to contain than they believe.
