Will #2015 be the year #Ebola is eradicated? Could Ebola, the global health disaster of this year, be cleared from west Africa in 2015? It would be rash to try to predict when that may happen. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, where I’ve been travelling, nobody is willing to hazard a guess. It has already been in Guinea for an entire year – the first case, which for so long went unrecognised, was in December 2013. Ebola is not a single epidemic. It is like a series of bushfires – as one is contained, another one sparks somewhere else. Quarantines, curfews and roadblocks haven’t stopped the spread. It isn’t possible to contain people for months, particularly when they live in dramatically impoverished circumstances. If they don’t get out of the house or the village to find the support of extended family and friends elsewhere, there is a good chance they will starve. There are attempts by NGOs to provide food and essential supplies to quarantined homes, but it isn’t happening everywhere. Talk of changing behaviour is easy. But when you think about the sort of behaviour that needs to change, you realise it’s very hard. How many of us could bear to watch our mother die without holding her hand, and then allow her body to be sprayed with chlorine, removed in a double body bag from the house, be loaded on to the back of a pick-up truck with several others, and taken to the cemetery for rapid interment with little more than a cursory prayer? More than one British civil servant in Sierra Leone, working on the international response which the UK leads, made a wry face to me and said that it would be equally hard for any of us at home to accept that sort of behavioural change. Calling the command centre to take away the sick is equally hard. It is your duty, in the interests of your own and the public good, to pick up the phone, but the reality is that, if you do, you may never hug your sister again. You can visit her in the treatment centre and talk across two fences. The fortunate will be reunited. For the rest, the future is the body bag. There is little difference between this west African agony and that of the people of Oran in Camus’s The Plague, for all that the fictional events took place 70 years earlier. Sadly, infectious diseases still have the ability to devastate individuals and communities. My feeling is that it won’t end without a vaccine. There may be one by the middle of next year, although it may not be 100% effective. Frontline workers will be given it first because of the high risk they run, but to finish the epidemic there will be a need to vaccinate the families and contacts of all those who fall sick. It is probably not feasible to vaccinate the entire population. Ebola has been a shocking wake-up call to the world, letting us understand that we are all just a flight away from deadly disease. Health is truly global. Minds and money are concentrated on eradicating this disease from Africa, but one hopes they are also set on how to prevent such a human and economic catastrophe happening again. timetoinspire.org/will-2015-be-the-year-ebola-is-eradicated/
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 13:06:14 +0000
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