Last week two American health workers infected with Ebola in
Liberia were brought to Atlanta, USA, to receive care. “The fact that we are taking the Ebola patients, while
others from the area are fleeing to the United States, is absolutely CRAZY,”
tweeted Donald Trump, a property mogul, to his 2.65m followers on August 2nd.
He is not the only one in a panic.
With around 1,700 suspected cases and more than 900 deaths,
the outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in 4 west African countries—Guinea,
Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone— is the biggest ever recorded. On August 8th the World Health Organisation
(WHO) declared the epidemic an "international emergency".
One reason for Ebola's frightening reputation (after all, diseases
such as tuberculosis and malaria kill far more people than it does) is that
comparatively little is known about it.
Ebola, like many other diseases, mainly menaces those
countries that are poor. Guinea is ranked by the UN as one of the poorest
countries in the world. In recent years Ebola has also struck in DRC, Sudan,
Uganda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, all countries where civil wars have left
poverty and deep scars. Urgent need drives people to cut down forests and hunt,
bringing them into contact with the wild animals thought to harbor Ebola, and
providing the virus with opportunities to jump to humans.
Run-down health facilities are another link in the chain.
Contrary to popular belief, Ebola is not particularly easy to catch, spreading
only via close contact with the bodily fluids of the very sick. Each victim
usually passes it to just one or two others.
"If you come to
a hospital in New York with vomiting or bleeding, healthcare workers use
gloves," says Dr Bausch. "But if you go to a hospital in Guinea, they
might say 'we just don't have any gloves'". Doctors and nurses in these
poor countries contract the virus, spread it to other patients and then bring
it home to their families. In this epidemic, more than 160 health care workers
have been infected, and around 80 have died.
After decades of civil wars in west Africa, outsiders and
authorities are widely distrusted. Villagers have attacked foreign health
workers. Families are concealing ill relatives rather than bringing them to
hospital. “We’ve never faced this level of population resistance before,” says
Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank.
US DOCTOR diagnosed with Ebola after working with patients in Liberia is recovering from the deadly disease.
