How the world will look if Ebola goes global

Tuesday, October 28, 2014
By Paul Martin

by Maryn McKenna
Wired.co.uk
28 October 14

If you listened hard over the weekend to the chatter around the political theatre of detaining a nurse returning from the Ebola zone in a tent with no heat or running water, you might have heard a larger concern expressed. It was this: What happens if this kind of punitive detention — which went far beyond what medical authorities recommend — deters aid workers from going to West Africa to help?

As a reminder, the African Ebola epidemic is still roaring in three countries; two others have contained the disease, but it has now leaked to a sixth, Mali. The case count is 10,141, with 4,922 deaths. Last month, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that if the epidemic continued on its current course, cases would hit 1.4 million by next January. Last week, Yale researchers said in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases that even current promises of international aid will not contain the epidemic — so the volunteering of medical personnel such as that nurse becomes even more important.

But what if, because of this weekend’s events, volunteers are discouraged from going to West Africa, for fear of how they will be received on return? Or what if they do go, and their efforts are still not enough?

I wanted to be sure I wasn’t over-imagining what might happen next with Ebola, if it is not contained at its source now. For a fact-check, I turned to Jody Lanard and Peter Sandman, two risk-communication experts who have been involved in most of the big epidemic threats of the past decades. (I met them, I think, in the first run-up of concern over H5N1 avian flu in 2003.)

I hoped they would tell me not to be too worried about Ebola becoming a permanent threat in West Africa. Instead, they told me to be very worried indeed.

Lanard and Sandman wrote an entire essay in response to my query to them, and they have put it up on their website (which is worth visiting as a deep resource of reasonable thinking about how to approach infectious disease). They call our refusal to engage with the depth of the epidemic in Africa, and its possible consequences for the world, “Failures of Imagination.”

Here are some things they say:

Some of the world’s top Ebola experts say they are worrying night and day about the possibility of endemic Ebola, a situation in which Ebola will continue to spread, and then presumably wax and wane repeatedly, in West Africa… Fewer experts refer publicly to what we think must frighten them even more (and certainly frightens us even more): the prospect of Ebola sparks landing and catching unnoticed in slums like Dharavi in Mumbai or Orangi Town in Karachi — or perhaps Makoko in Lagos.

The Rest…HERE

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