The World's Reaction to Ebola

People from all over the world have left behind lives of relative comfort and safety in the fight to stop the largest Ebola outbreak in history. But the governments of the rich world have not followed their example. Also here is a good video to watch.

The graphic below shows how unprecedented the current outbreak has been. It quickly infected, and killed, more people than in the rest of recorded history. That it was the largest outbreak ever was know months ago, not long after it started in March. For background: Africa is the 2nd largest continent, the current outbreak is taking place in a region of the world, West Africa, that has never dealt with Ebola before. The closest previous outbreak was at least 1300 miles away.

Despite it being obvious this is the largest outbreak ever a while ago, it was only last month that the US announced it was going to help. As NPR has been reporting, what aid the US has offered - training of health workers and building of hospitals - has been making slow progress so far, and not for no reason.

So why wasn't this started sooner? The scale was obvious. This is not charity, as the fact that an Ebola infected man made it to the US, and a Spanish nurse caught Ebola from a patient shows. The outbreak is centered on three of West Africa's poorest countries. It is in the interest of those with a greater ability to pay to help stop the spread, because if they don't, Ebola will spread, do more damage to more people in more places and cost more money to stop.

My initial feeling was that the slow response could only be down to three things: a callous indifference, inexcusable ignorance, or incompetence. But because it is a problem the whole world should be involved in to keep Ebola from spreading in the world, indifference is only possible with ignorance. And there is no way that US officials, and their rich country counterparts, weren't aware of the situation.

It is true that Ebola, having killed over 4000 so far, is rather low on the list of diseases killing West Africans. But the world need only give the disease time to potentially become a major contender. Given the high fatality, and danger posed to health care workers, and that there are too few of them in the region to begin with, the detrimental effect on health systems is large. The most efficient way to prevent a larger disaster was to act aggressively in the early stages a while back. Don't be incompetent; helping isn't charity[1], this is basic.





1. Nothing wrong with charity, we should've helped even if it was simply charity. I'm just saying even rational self interest justified a quicker, larger response to make the point that it suggests incompetence that there was not a quicker, larger response.