Sir, – By the time this letter is published, the official death toll from the current outbreak of the Ebola virus will have passed the 5,000 mark. The real figure is, of course, much higher.
The mixture of emotions this provokes is hard to describe. Naturally, I think of friends and associates in west Africa who face the threat, some of them working hard to counter it on behalf of everyone else. But there is also profound frustration that it has come to this, when the situation could have been avoided. Médicins San Frontières (MSF) has been working on the ground from the very start, and warning for many months that urgent action was needed.
It’s not as if we don’t know how to tackle Ebola. It has been stopped in the past, and Nigeria and Senegal have both halted outbreaks in recent weeks, largely with their own resources. Work on vaccines and treatments is of course welcome for the medium term, but we already have the technology to stop the epidemic. This mainly involves education, treatment centres, chlorine and personal protection equipment, contact tracing and trained staff. It is not a high-tech challenge.
Ebola is not infectious until it shows symptoms. Most of those who are infected have been dealing with people who were ill or died in the community. When people are turned away from treatment centres because there is no space left, their return to the community can only mean one thing – that it will spread to more people.
When mobilised, humanity is capable of cooperating to achieve extraordinary and seemingly impossible things – some of them inspiring and positive, others frivolous or even destructive. It’s one of the things which defines us. The way we have collectively responded to this outbreak in Liberia and Sierra Leone, which have achieved so much since emerging from war, is not one of our successes. The opportunity to prove ourselves as a species in this case is rapidly disappearing. – Yours, etc,
Dr WALT KILROY,
Institute for International
Conflict Resolution
and Reconstruction,
Dublin City University,
Dublin 9.