We can overcome outbreaks
Africans are showing us how evidence-based science can save us
Several weeks ago, I wrote a short essay, How to Beat Ebola, for the London Review of Books about the rise and fall of the Ebola outbreak in Uganda. For those who didn’t have a chance to read it, here is the full text.
Ebola is a frightening disease. It spreads from person to person through contact with bodily fluids, and symptoms include vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding. It has an average fatality rate of 50 per cent if left untreated. (Covid-19 has a crude fatality rate of 2.7 per cent.)
First detected in 1976 in a village near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then known as Zaire), the disease is believed to have a zoonotic origin (probably fruit bats). But colonial extraction and chronic dispossession in recently independent nations were also among the causes, as they contributed to a lack of preparedness for emerging epidemics.
There have been several Ebola outbreaks in both West and East Africa over recent years, often straining local health departments. But with nationwide public health funding, political stability, vaccine trials and intra-African co-operation, it’s possible for a country to contain an outbreak of the disease and recover quickly from it.
When the Ugandan Health Ministry reported an Ebola case on 30 January this year – the country’s eighth outbreak since 2000 – they were neither surprised nor unprepared. Patients were treated at Mulago National Referral Hospital and Mbale Regional Referral Hospital. Health officials worked with locally trained physicians and co-ordinated with other African doctors as well as some international non-profit organisations. More than two hundred people who had contact with Ebola sufferers were quarantined, and their cases followed up. On 3 February the Ugandan Health Ministry and the World Health Organisation began a clinical trial for a vaccine targeting the Sudan variant of the Ebola virus. The lead researchers are from Makerere University and the Uganda Virus Research Institute.
Uganda declared the outbreak over on 26 April. In total there had been fourteen reported cases, of whom four died and ten fully recovered. It was a public health victory which showed that Africans could co-operate to end an epidemic on their own terms.
The Trump administration’s dissolution of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), reducing the organisation to fifteen staff and eliminating over 80 per cent of its programmes – including initiatives for the humanitarian response in Sudan and HIV/Aids medication – has worsened health conditions for some of the most vulnerable populations in the world. In 2014, when a large Ebola outbreak swept through West Africa, the US allocated $8.3 billion for global health, including funds for maternal health, HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis. (To put that sum in context, the US Defense Department’s discretionary budget for 2014 was $615 billion.) But some public health initiatives in African are now managing without American funds.
‘It is necessary to examine the internal factors which make our continent so vulnerable to attack,’ Kwame Nkrumah wrote in 1968, ‘and particularly to look closely at the whole question of African unity. For this lies at the core of our problem.’ In 2016, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention was set up as ‘a continental autonomous health agency of the African Union established to support public health initiatives’.
Dr Jean Kaseya, the Africa CDC’s director general, holds weekly press briefings online. As Dr Mosoka Fallah, the organisation’s acting director for science and innovation, told Forbes Africa last month, ‘it’s about getting to the community, hearing from them, making them a part of the co-creation of the messages.’
More than anything, perhaps, it seems that African public health experts are trusting science. The US government could learn something from them.
Some News
You can listen to me on the BBC Science Cafe, where I provide insight on global health and diseases.
Listen to a review of the German translation of my book, “Eingesperrt und ausgegrenzt,” on Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
If you want to practice your German skills, read my interview with Jakob Pallinger in Der Standard, an Austrian newspaper, about the German translation of my latest book, “Eingespertt und ausgegrenzt.”
In another interview, I shared my thoughts about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community activism, and more with Black Agenda Report.
You can watch a conversation between me and New York Times journalist Linda Villarosa on C-SPAN, where we discuss A History of the World in Six Plagues at the New York Public Library.
Some Recommendations
Jennifer Wilson divulges the intricacies of sex choreography and her training as an intimacy coordinator for The New Yorker.
I love it when a writer talks about class and gender in literature. If you feel the same way, I highly recommend reading Sandra Cisneros’ latest essay in The Paris Review.
I’ve been texting some Los Angeles-based friends all week about the protests in their city. For those of you who want a firsthand account, read this article by Jamie Lee Taete in The Cut.
Rozina Ali writes about Mahmoud Khalil’s detention by the US government and why everyone should be concerned. You can read Ali’s article in The New York Review of Books.
Please consider giving a positive review of my book, A History of the World in Six Plagues, on Amazon, Bookshop, and Goodreads. I would be grateful if you could recommend the book to people in your life, such as relatives, coworkers, pen pals, editors, or loved ones. You can post about the book on social media, in newsletters, or nominate me for a prize, etc.
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