Long after this Ebola panic, Africa will still be paying the price

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/09/ebola-africa-paying-price-progress-at-risk

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Some years ago my then boyfriend came home from a work trip to Sierra Leone complaining of feeling rundown. Hardly unexpected, since he’d been covering a war. But days later he was still moaning and snuffling, running a slight temperature. Halfway out the door and late for work, I admit I wasn’t enormously sympathetic. The words “man flu” may have been used. He rang a few hours later, sounding only slightly reproachful, from the isolation unit for infectious diseases to which the office nurse – quite rightly alert to the possible implications of a fever acquired in west Africa – had dispatched him.

When I came to visit him at this strangely eerie outpost, with its posters on Ebola and Lassa fever stuck to the walls, they handed me a face mask. He spent several days in the care of some extremely impressive and kindly nurses before being diagnosed with a nasty dose of acute viral rhinitis. Otherwise known as the common cold.

Thankfully that’s probably as close as most of us in the developed world – apart from trained medics en route to Africa with the international relief effort – will ever come to dying of Ebola.

That isolation unit in London has now moved to the Royal Free hospital, but what I saw there gives me confidence that if and when a case emerges on these shores (as opposed to a Briton infected overseas being repatriated for treatment), the NHS is well prepared to cope, both with the sick and with the inevitable tidal waves of worried well.

Unlike Sierra Leone, we’re blessed with modern hospitals that shouldn’t buckle under the strain: we’re not struggling to cope with only 120 doctors for every six million citizens. We’re lucky enough to take for granted the existence of soap and running water in every home. We’re not dealing with an airborne bug, like swine flu or Sars – the respiratory virus that caused brief worldwide panic in 2003.

Ebola spreads by close contact with bodily fluids, so you can’t catch it just from being on the same plane or train as someone with the virus. The anxious parents who forced the head of a Stockport school to cancel a visit from a charity worker and her son, both of whom live in Sierra Leone, needn’t really have panicked. Yet the head said she was left with no choice, given what she called the “misguided hysteria”, adding that misinformation sweeping the playground rendered it “not an environment that I would wish a visitor to experience”. Evidently they risked a hostile reception.

And that’s the problem. The single most reliable way for Britons now to avoid a gruesome early death remains to take up jogging and lay off the booze, not to close down Heathrow. Smoking is infinitely more likely than some exotic foreign virus to carry us off. But those public health messages lack the urgency and drama of Ebola; our familiar vices, deadly as they can eventually be, aren’t the stuff of horror movies.

There’s something unique about a virus that triggers deep primitive fears of infection and contamination, and renders us hostile and suspicious of our fellow humans. There is an unpleasant edge to the reported mood in Dallas, where a Liberian man diagnosed with Ebola after spending days in the city has now died, with African-looking residents being asked why they don’t “get themselves quarantined”.

Here in Britain, meanwhile, the government has announced it is to screen travellers at major airports – even though the World Health Organisation says screening is best done on the way out of stricken countries, not on the way in anywhere else; even though the experts say screening wouldn’t have caught Thomas Duncan, the man who died in Dallas; even though direct flights from the three affected countries have stopped, so you’d have to trawl through thousands of passengers from everywhere and anywhere, searching haystack after haystack of perfectly healthy people. Nobody wants to hear that modern life inevitably comes with a certain level of infectious risk, but the truth is that it does.

Since the 1970s at least 30 previously unknown infections have erupted around the world, and although none so far have lived up to doomsday billing, the fear in public health circles has long been that one day we could face the big one: a fullblown killer for the jet age, far more contagious than Ebola, taking advantage of an intimately interconnected world to spread at breakneck speed.

Even if we could somehow reverse globalisation overnight – close markets and borders, sever lifelines to the developing world, turn the clock back a century or so – that wouldn’t necessarily save us from pandemics: the 500 million people infected by the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak are testament to that. But the price of our unprecedented freedom to work, travel and study wherever we like is undeniably that it’s now easier for a nasty surprise to hitch a ride home, whether with an adventurous British holidaymaker or a sick outsider. The trick is not to panic about that but to prepare for it, equipping ourselves and others to cope – because while you can seal off a sick patient in a sterile bubble, it makes no sense to do the same to a nation.

Long after the west has forgotten about this particular outbreak, Africa may still be paying the price for it. People will die of wholly preventable diseases, because routine vaccinations couldn’t be carried out amid the chaos. The World Bank reckons billions could be wiped off GDP in countries where economic growth means the difference between people going hungry or not; as its president said : “Nothing less than the future of west Africa is at stake.”

Businesses are folding because customers aren’t venturing out, foreign workers are leaving and foreign investors are getting jumpy; children are missing school. Years of progress are now at risk, in countries only just emerging from ruinous civil wars.

So if you’re going to fear something, fear that. If you want to agitate for something, make it the overseas aid budgets that fund everything from vaccine development and better literacy to basic medical care, clean water and modern farming methods – all the things that could help stop the next unknown virus, just waiting for its chance to jump a species barrier. Isolation of the infected may get us through this epidemic. But it is collaboration that will save us from the next one.