There are two ways to look at Ebola, a brutal affliction that first appeared in 1976 in rural Congo, not far from the Ebola River, but in recent weeks has, in addition to ravaging West Africa, launched countless news reports and hundreds of Op-Ed columns.
The first and most obvious is to consider the epidemic’s dreadful toll so far: As of March this year, more than 10,000 cases have been reported, with more than half of them fatal. In countries like Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the doubling time for the outbreak is roughly 15 days. The US Centers for Disease Control suggested in early September that unless “urgent action is taken,” more than a million people could be infected in the next few months.
The second way to look at Ebola is in context of the delicate balance that binds us to our natural world. Ebola, a virus that leaps from animal hosts to humans, is no less devastating than other dreadful epidemics that have wreaked havoc on our planet in the past, all the way from the Black Death in the 14th Century to HIV in the 1980s.
Let’s then put the Ebola outbreak in context of how so utterly fragile our place is in the ecological system, despite our professed efforts (at least professed in the western culture) to “tame nature” and “conquer space.”
Less than 700 years ago, in October 1347, an Italian fleet made its way to the Messina harbor in Sicily. Virtually its entire crew was dead or dying, afflicted with a virus that they had brought with them, this time not from Africa but the Orient. Or to be more exact, they had picked up the virus from rats and fleas that had hitched a ride on their ships. Within six months, the pestilence spread throughout Messina and finally across the whole of Europe, representing the greatest natural disaster in European history.
By 1351, a mere four years, the Black Death, as it came to be known, had killed half the continent’s population. You wonder how a bacillus transmitted by rat fleas brought on such an ecological reign of terror, effectively killing one European in three, wiping out entire towns and villages, transforming the foundation of medieval society and restructuring the fabric of European civilization. And you wonder equally how humans, who define themselves as masters of their domain, are, when all is said and done, at the mercy of changes in insect, rodent or simian ecology. But that is the humbling truth.
Consider our helplessness in the face of HIV. As the virus continues its death march around the globe, infecting 50 million people — a sobering figure to say the least — the search for an AIDS vaccine remains elusive. Those of us who followed the progress of the disease in the 1980s, recall how, after scientists first proved that HIV causes AIDS, a vaccine race was on, with high hopes that the world would soon have a means to stop it. The race today closely resembles a crawl.
Or consider the consequences of this modern plague, for the numbers are not just astounding but, hyperbole aside, fantastical. In countries like Zimbabwe, Namibia and Zambia, for example, where HIV is most rampant, more than one in every three adults is infected. (All told, countries in sub-Saharan Africa now account for two thirds of the estimated 50 million HIV infected people in the world.)
Back to Ebola, a virus that infects most of those who care for the sick and kills most of those who fall ill with it, and whose expected toll, it is worth repeating, is likely to exceed one million infected people in the next few months. Sadly, that could be in part the result of a failure in African hospitals to follow the rules of modern infection control, which in turn is a function of a weak health care system, where nurses, for example, reuse needles, do not wear gloves, gowns or masks, and operate under unsanitary conditions.
Paul Farmer, a health care activist who returned from Liberia recently with a group of physicians, wrote in the current issue of the London Review of Books: “One CNN interviewer asked me if Ebola might spread to Europe and North America. ‘Of course it will,’ I replied. ‘We live in a global economy’.”
He was right. The case of the traveler from Liberia, who boarded a flight from Monrovia to the United States on Sept. 19 and fell ill in Dallas, is well known. Two days after his arrival, he died of the virus.
The two nurses, who had attended to him, also got infected and are now in intensive care. Last Friday, a New York physician, who recently returned from the front lines of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was tested positive, becoming the fourth person diagnosed with the infection in the United States.
Yes, Ebola might indeed spread to Europe and North America. If it does, it might also spread with it the fear of God. In short, it might disabuse people in the Euro-American world of the ethnocentric notion that human beings can, let alone should, tame nature and conquer space, as if we are not part of nature and pace, an extension of their subtlety, the mystery encoded in their little creatures we call viruses that, at least under the microscope, play their little tricks on us, showing their elusive faces here, their phantom patterns there.
The key to understanding Ebola today, as to understanding other equally dreadful disasters in history, is to look at man’s helplessness before nature, not his putative ability to tame it, an exercise reminiscent of someone fighting his own shadows.
