But there in lies a salutary lesson: because if even a tiny fraction – less than 1% – of what the present outbreak is now costing the world in terms of lost productivity, humanitarian aid and human lives lost had been spent 20 years ago to develop an Ebola vaccine, we probably wouldn’t be in this position now. It was a tropical disease of low importance and (presumed to be) constrained by geography and climate to a part of the world that held little economic interest to the rest of us. So why is it that, nearly 40 years after Ebola first surfaced, the world finds itself in a state of panic, and up to ten thousand people are dead, owing to a bug that‘s probably preventable thanks to scientific research done decades ago? The answer is that Ebola was regarded as someone else’s problem. “Way too late,” many are saying, to prevent the inevitable. Trials are only now getting underway of human versions of the vaccines in Oxford, UK, and the US. But because they are at a test stage, these agents, which will be critical if we’re to nip this outbreak in the bud, are nowhere near ready for mass production.
Experimental vaccines tested so far on animals have been impressively effective, protecting against even injection of the live Ebola virus. What is remarkable though is that, while Ebola is terrifying and dramatic in its impact when it causes an outbreak, it appears to be a relatively easy agent to fight.
The West has had its own wake-up call this week as the US and Spain, countries previously regarded as immune to the threat thanks to modern medicine, have reported imported cases of the condition and despite strict infection-control guidelines and practices, onward transmissions of Ebola on their home soil. It’s also no longer just an African problem. So this single present outbreak is already three times larger than the entire Ebola death toll ever. To put the scale of the present situation into perspective, since the first recorded case of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo 38 year ago there have been fever than 2.500 death documented in total. And because the rates of infection appear to be growing exponentially, tens of thousands, or even millions, might ultimately be affected. The CDC in America also estimate that, because the level of reporting is so poor, the numbers can, in all likelihood, be doubled or even tripled. At the time of writing at least 7000 people have been infected and half of those have died. These are amazing advances, but while all this scientific back-slapping is going on, the dark cloud on the horizon is the emerging Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the warning undercurrent that comes with it. Problems 4-9 are based on the following passage
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