When it comes to Ebola, the first thing you need to know is that dying from the
virus is like something out of a horror movie.
It's extremely painful and terrifying. First you get a fever, then
uncontrollable diarrhea, then you begin hemorrhaging blood. And while all that's
hitting you, you lose touch with reality and become delirious. Finally, within days
you are dead. West Africa is currently in the midst of
- by far - the worst case of the disease since it was first discovered in Africa
back in 1976. This year's outbreak has been traced to a two-year-old boy who
died on December 6th, 2013 in a village in Guinea. He probably got the virus by
eating contaminated food that had been drooled or defecated on by a bat. Or, as
is common in this part of the world, had eaten some bat for dinner.
Bats, researchers believe, are the carriers of the disease. As if the
two-year-old's death wasn't tragic enough, a week after it killed him it killed his
mother, his three-year-old sister, and then his grandmother. Now it's customary
in some African villages to prepare a body for burial through the extremely
sanitary cleansing ritual that involves evacuating the body of all food and
excreta - often using just bare hands - since the disease is spread by bodily
fluids getting into the eyes nose or mouth it's no surprise that two people
who traveled to the grandmother's funeral caught Ebola and brought it home to
their villages. After escaping Ground Zero, the highly contagious, undetected
virus was off to the races. By the end of March, Ebola had reached
Liberia. And in June the first case was reported in Monrovia, Liberia's Capitol
City. That's when outbreaks like this really
start to spread: when the infected people make their way to population centers
during the incubation phase, before their symptoms begin. A group of people from
Sierra Leone who had traveled to an Ebola victim's funeral brought the
disease back across the border, and in late July the virus that hit Sierra
Leone's capital, Freetown. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are three of the 17
nations that form the economic community of West
African states - whose combined territory is roughly half the land area of the
United States, but with the population roughly the same at 340 million - it's
about twice as dense as America. And since the disease is easily passed from
person to person, and there are lots of people here, it's crucial to get
outbreaks like this under control as quickly as possible. Especially since a
staggering 47% or 2,984 of the just over 6,400 people who have been sickened
by this strain of Ebola have died. So understandably this is terrifying to
neighboring countries who have responded by shutting down their borders.
Still, Nigeria - the largest country in Africa by population and economic output -
couldn't keep the disease beyond its borders when an infected Liberian American man named
Patrick Sawyer flew into Nigeria's largest city and died shortly thereafter.
A Nigerian doctor named Stella Amayo Adadevo stopped Sawyer from
leaving the hospital, stopping the spread of Ebola to the 21 million people living
in Lagos. Sadly, doctor Adadevo contracted
Ebola and died, but she left this world a hero by helping to successfully limit
the outbreak to just 21 cases and eight deaths in her country.
No new cases have been reported in Nigeria in weeks. Liberia's experience however has been
the exact opposite. The disease is out of control there. Cases doubled in the three
weeks between August 31st and September 22nd. As a response,
Liberia's Harvard-educated president, Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf - the first female head of state in the history of Africa - had no choice
but to order a lockdown of a highly infected slum in the capital. This didn't
last long though as an angry crowd attacked an Ebola center and freed the
infected. The second hardest hit country, Sierra Leone, has resorted to an
unprecedented 3-day nationwide lockdown of its six million residents in
an effort to halt the disease. But these countries are fighting an uphill battle.
Many parts of West Africa lack even proper sanitation or drinking water. Too
many people are poorly educated, scared, and mistrustful. To add insult to
injury, aid workers keep getting attacked for spreading information about Ebola, or
trying to collect the bodies of the disease's victims. And in September, an
entire team of eight aid workers was murdered by villagers in Guinea. When
American health care workers in Liberia contracted the disease, and had to be
flown to the United States for life-saving treatment, the rest of the
world was shaken by the possibility of Ebola spreading outside of Africa's
borders. It was the first time an Ebola infected person had stepped foot on
American soil, but it wasn't the first time someone on Western soil had been
infected. In 1976, the year of the first documented Ebola outbreak, a British
scientist named Jeffrey Platt - researching the disease in a lab in
England - accidentally stabbed himself with a syringe containing the virus.
As the unmistakable symptoms of Ebola set in over the next few days,
the British government acted swiftly. Platt was transported in a special
ambulance under police escort to a London hospital where he was the lone
patient. He was kept in an isolation chamber and all hospital staff working
on his case were quarantined, as was his family, and any lab workers and friends
he had come in contact with. The extreme action worked: Platt recovered without
infecting anyone else. But the current incarnation of Ebola is threatening to
overwhelm the much more economically-challenged West African region. Answering
the call to action, the United States military is taking the lead in
overseeing and coordinating the response to the epidemic. In addition to US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff who have been there for
weeks, President Obama has ordered 3,000 American troops to West Africa to
build seventeen 100-bed treatment centers, and a site capable of training 500 health care
workers a week. The US response is worth an estimated 750 million dollars
over the next six months. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has, alone, donated
60 million dollars. And the foundation of Paul Allen - Gates' co-founder of
Microsoft - has given nearly 12 million dollars.
The American-led international response may come just in time, as infection
levels were spiking exponentially in the middle of September. If no help had come,
some experts were fearing the disease could have overwhelmed the region and
spread until it exhausted its host population killing hundreds of thousands,
or even millions of Africans; all the time increasing the odds that it could
make its way off the continent. The World Health Organization
now optimistically hopes to control Ebola by mid-2015, limiting the death
toll to around 10,000.
Thanks for watching this installment of The Daily Conversation. If you'd like us to tackle a particular subject in this mini-
documentary format, leave your idea in a comment below. Until next time, I'm Bryce Plank