The Truth About Ebola

Saturday 8th November

You are very very unlikely to catch it.  Even if someone got into the UK with it and travelled on the tube, which is possibly our biggest nightmare, they would be unlikely to have infected anyone and even if they did control measures would be rapidly put into place.  It might mean a lock-down of parts of the country but we would be able to both contain and deal with it.  The very few non-Africans who have caught it have mostly been medical staff treating severely or dying patients.

Ebola is, like Cholera and TB and Lassa fever and Malaria, a disease of Poverty.  We have successfully exported these diseases to the third world, where no-one even counts the dead properly.  The West has only woken up once a handful of Westerners contracted the disease.  Twenty thousand die of Lassa fever with very similar symptoms in West Africa every year – and no-one gives a shit.  Hundreds of thousands die of Malaria and even more of Malnutrition related illnesses.  But you cannot import Malnutrition, although the growing number of food banks would indicate the Government are having a damn good try.

We are ghoulish specatators, avidly watching the news and tut-tutting into our take-away Pizza as the body bags are carried away.  Just as we watched Tsunami’s and Earthquakes, or a few decades ago Executions, so we watch videos from bombers of buildings exploding, sadly the resolution is not good enough to see the bodies being ripped apart and then we go on-line and play computer games where enemies are blown away with the same lack of remorse.  And as soon as the few Westerners are declared healed or sadly die, Ebola will disappear from our screens, but will continue to kill thousands more over there.