Americans. Don’t you just love them.

America is a peculiar place. 

         Its land is vast with a population of over 300 million, enjoying the highest GDP on earth. The average American has an annual income of over $66,000. (We need not bother our heads over how this income is distributed). Suffice it to say that this is a per capita income that is exceeded by only a handful of tiny sheikdoms producing lots of oil, plus a few small European countries skilled in the management of secret money owned by extremely wealthy individuals. 

         Forty-two percent of Americans have a college education, bettered only by Canada (Number 1) and a few other OECD countries. America’s dominance in educating its people is underscored by the fact that 7 of their universities are among the 10 best in the world. It is well to note too that, in America, there are about 25 doctors for every 10,000 population; put in another way, every doctor registered to practice medicine in America has, on average, only 400 individuals to look after.  

          You may already be wondering where all this is leading. Well, the conclusion that any reasonable person would draw from this snapshot of Americana is that the land flows with milk and money. Sorry, honey. Enough honey to, at least, sweeten the temperament and lubricate neural circuits responsible for clear thinking. But most disappointingly, the country seems to fall down every time it is called upon to lead the world in rational thinking. Every time, before and since one of their greatest ever presidents asserted that the only thing that they have to fear is fear itself, Americans have consistently shown a fearfulness that is almost primal. They have been afraid to escape from the bonds of slavery; they have feared Japanese-Americans during World War II; they have dreaded communist bogeymen under the bed during the Cold War; they went wild with fear during the early stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; Al Qaida petrified them to the point of incoherence (but that, you might say was a GW thing); and in 2014, Al Qaida’s progeny, ISIL leaves America quivering. And this year also, America is gripped by fear just because of a single case of Ebola entering their pristine realm. 

        Why, you may ask, is America not using all its valuable assets to inform public debate and policy about Ebola? Instead, what we see is a shambolic media and political show concerning the remote possibility of Ebola threatening the American way of life.

To be honest with you, I feel totally let down by these antics because I had believed that Ebola's spread in West Africa was due partly to a lack of public literacy in a region where factors of well-being are orders of magnitude lower than in America.

          There is no upside to this type of paranoia. But downsides are many. Not the least of these is the prevailing view that Americans going to West Africa to help control Ebola there may not be allowed to integrate back into their community when they return home. It should be clear to all that if Americans are prevented from returning to the bosom of their loved ones there is no way they would want to go to the region where help is most needed. Is this what America really wants? 
      Please tell me it is not so.

 Tell Fren Tru

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