Asymmetric Warfare

We are headed for Armageddon, it seems.  Exercises modelling where Ebola is heading are terrifying. We are told that there will be from between 20,000 to 200,000 cases in the medium to long term and also, that the disease will likely spread to other continents. What is even scarier is that the virus, reportedly, is mutating at a high rate, raising the possibility that new, more dangerous isolates could arise and that these could infect--wait for it--not just by contagion but through the air also, a prospect that is mind-bendingly awful. 

Ebola Cases In Sierra Leone

   This is asymmetric warfare in which, so far, West Africa does not appear to have an answer.

Meanwhile, we blame ignorance as one of the factors fuelling the disease’s spread. We say, lack of education makes it near-impossible to engage minds with concepts such as viruses and bacteria that kill people by the dozen. To those minds, such notions are about as confounding as things that go bump in the night... This is a difficulty we can understand.

But what I don’t get is the response of those who have had more than just basic education, but who have shown the most perplexing response when they realize that they may have contracted Ebola. They too, run. And when they run they do so to places where they are most likely to cause maximum chaos. Take the case of Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American consultant at the Liberian Ministry of Finance and who absconded from Ebola surveillance there, boarded a flight to Lagos, Nigeria and introduced the infection into that country. And take also one of the persons Sawyer infected in Lagos. This man, Ibukun Koye is the Head of the ECOWAS Liaison Office in Lagos and was one of Mr Sawyer’s primary contacts. Koye himself, realizing he had become symptomatic, absconded from quarantine in Lagos. He ran to the city of Port Harcourt in south-east Nigeria and, somehow, persuaded a doctor there to treat him in a hotel, of all places. This doctor has since died from Ebola, whilst Mr Koye survives. Then, there is the Guinean, so far unnamed, but identified as a third-year student at the University of Conakry, who left his village near the Sierra Leone border in south west Guinea, evading Guinean quarantine to end up in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. His was a 1000 km road trip that left a trail of contacts wherever he went, ending up in a compound in Dakar where 33 residents are now quarantined. No one knows why he did it but the potential consequences of his odyssey now hang over Senegal’s head.

In a few days, Sierra Leone will be clamped under curfew in which everyone, apart from those involved in essential services will be required to stay at home for a 72-hour period. 
Will this make a difference? 

Tell Fren Tru