Mike Phipps offers some elementary facts about the epidemic and what it tells us about western priorities.

1. Ebola is fuelled by poverty. It broke out in west African countries that had been devastated by long civil wars. Given the resultant collapse of the public health system, if it hadn’t been Ebola, it would have been something else. Such epidemics require an alleviation of poverty – redistribution, sanitation, good nutrition and education.

2. There is no magic bullet. It won’t be fixed by sending US troops to carry out rapid vaccination programmes. It requires health professionals to carry out “contact tracing” – identification and quarantining those who have been in contact with those infected, as Professor Allyson Pollock has explained.

3. Ebola is hitting the headlines because it might kill the wrong people. The panic is disproportionate to the actual mortality rates and related more to the fact that rich white people might die from it, given the lack of a cure. But it’s hardly the biggest threat to life in poorer countries. The World Health Organisation reckons 15,000 people may have died from the current outbreak, a higher figure than usually reported in the media. But 1.2 million people die every year from malaria and 1.5 million from TB. Continue reading →