Is This Ebola’s Tipping Point?
TheDailyBeast.com
08.26.14
With the DR-Congo now Ebola-stricken, fears of an Armageddon are rising. Until these nations can provide basic health care, the fear is warranted.
The current Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia has lasted almost six months. Small progress has been made in terms of control, but yesterday’s modest advance often appears offset by tomorrow’s new catastrophe.
The best news is from Nigeria, which saw a few cases related to an infected traveler. There the epidemic appears to have been halted although the recent announcement of two additional cases calls into question even this small claim. Now there is news of a second, probably unrelated group of up to 13 Ebola cases in Gara, a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gara is almost 2,000 miles away from Liberia and initial investigation has found no epidemiologic links between the Gara cases and those seen over the last 5-plus months in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
The appearance of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DR-Congo (not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo, a separate country which sits along the northwest border of DR-Congo) is not a surprise. This is where Ebola first was identified in 1976; the 2014 cases represent the seventh time a new cluster of disease has been seen in this country. Furthermore, the Republic of the Congo, sometimes referred to simply as the Congo, itself has seen three smallish epidemics over the last 38 years.
All of this Ebola activity raises a number of questions, each of them alarming. Is something happening in Africa that is new, along the lines of various Armageddon-like predictions through the years, from the Hot Zone forward, a calamitous and permanent perturbation of the delicate balance between man, animals, and ecosystem, a tipping point, a point of no return? Though this sort of super-simple prognosticating sells lots of books, this scenario is quite doubtful—scary as Ebola feels right now, we are still talking about a relatively slow-moving (2,500 cases in six months) infection that requires intimate contact to transmit. Plus, as cruel as Homo sapiens is to the environment, the small villages such as Gara, where the disease often begins, are hardly places where McDonald’s, Big Oil, and Walmart are turning trees to parking lots.
Maybe it is really much worse—but they (whoever they are) simply aren’t telling us. Of course a grand conspiracy always feels good; it is strangely assuring in its tidiness and of course in the post-Snowden era of Totalitarian Information Awareness, anything seems game. But Ebola is far too fussy a virus to spread purposely and the disease itself makes far too dramatic a splash to creep along as some sleeper cell-type killer. So though I am all for paranoia as part of a healthy daily regimen of exercise and moderate eating, this one is just too far out there.
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