Fear and confusion don’t help to defeat the virus.
“An experimental vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus could be tested on people in as little as 18months,” reported the New Scientist in May 2002.
Under a year had passed since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To Western eyes the world seemed rife with new and unexpected threats.
The vaccine was supposed to be developed for American doctors, soldiers and humanitarian workers, but in the words of the scientific magazine,“researchers hope it will also be made available to people in Central African countries, where there have been repeated small outbreaks of the disease.”
That same year around 50people died in Gabon after contracting the virus. Up until now, no attempts have been made to use Ebola as a biological weapon – unlike the virus anthrax, spores of which were sent in letters mailed through the US postal system in 2001 by persons unknown – but the temptation is always there. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the American National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress that during the Cold War the former Soviet Union tried to ‘cultivate’ the microbe for potential use in biological warfare, but without success.
Elsewhere, in 1992 the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo sent a medical group of 40 people ostensibly to help provide aid during an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their real purpose, however, was to collect Ebola virus to use as a weapon. The attempt failed.
Whether or not the danger is naturally occurring or artificially induced, the threat of a deadly virus haunts the West’s collective imagination, despite positive factors from a medical and scientific point of view.
The Moroccan sports authorities in Rabat will no longer host the Africa Cup of Nations, preferring to pay a fine imposed by the Confederation of African Football rather than face an improbable viral contamination through athletes and fans.
Tourists are cancelling trips to African destinations.
Preventative measures and screenings are being increased everywhere, although there are doubts about their actual effectiveness.
But virologist John Oxford from Queen Mary, University of London, did not pull his punches when criticising these measures: “I know there is the whole issue of screening at airports but it has not worked in the past. All you do is cause confusion and upset. The best way to go about this … is to declare war on the virus and go at it at the source where it is in West Africa.”
This is not the return of the Black Death, a plague that punished supposed collective sins that crowded the imaginations of the fearful. In the Bible, the plague of old exterminated the Philistines, guilty of having stolen the Ark of the Covenant. In the nightmares of Europe and America, Ebola seems ready to strike all sinners, yet the only wrongdoing seems to be ‘too much openness’ towards other peoples.
Fear and confusion don’t help to defeat the virus.
