Sounds like a whole lot of money that could be better spent in the US being flushed down a Liberian toilet to me, unless there’s some actual threat to the US involved.
The money won’t be used quickly, but it will free up organizations operating on the ground to spend the money they do have now knowing more is en route. I think a robust response will help avoid the worst case scenario, but it’s clear to everyone that things will get worse before they get better.
In my opinion the problem is that waiting until there “is a threat” to the US and then acting would very likely involve much more than $763 million.
If (big “if”, I know, but let’s go with it for now) an expenditure of $763 million now helps prevent or mitigate the eventual arrival of Ebola to the US by fighting it at the source, then it is money well spent in my opinion.
Even if part of that money gets siphoned off by corrupt institutions and individuals in Liberia, i doubt all of it (or even most of it) will. And it will make a big difference, and help limit the spread of the disease. Which is something that all of us are (or should be) interested in, even if only for our own self-interest.
Also, it seems to me that 1 dollar will “stretch” further in Liberia than in the US when it comes to paying for basic necessities to furnish a hospital or treatment center (although here I am talking out of my ass, of course). $763 million (or whatever is left after the likely inevitable pay-offs, bribes and pocketing) will “pay” for much more over there than in the US.
Just my 2 eurocent!
I think one of the big worries is the potential for political breakdown, and all the repercussions that could have on neighboring states. Failed states are not good for us-- they are poor trade partners, they run drugs, and they end up as safe havens for bad guys. West Africa has made enormous strides in the last decade, and it wouldn’t be good for us if those get reversed.
The money won’t be “flushed down the drain.” Public health is one of the few development things that we do very, very well. The money won’t magically cure all Ebola, but it will have an enormous impact. Perhaps even more valuable will be what we learn from this. The processes we develop in this response will be an enormous leap forward in our capacity to respond to outbreaks both abroad and at home.
So 8 members of a health team trying to spread Ebola awareness have been massacred by villagers in Guinea.
So in addition to risking contracting a very deadly disease and being in the middle of extreme human despair, aid workers will now have this on the back of their minds when they go over there to help. At this point, anyone who volunteers is probably trying out for sainthood.
So the 3-day lockdown in Sierra Leone is having some predictable results, as thousands flee into neighboring Guinea:
http://www.euronews.com/2014/09/20/thousands-evade-ebola-lockdown-in-sierra-leone/
I wonder if it’s possible to really contain this, as people will probably keep running away from the worst areas when it gets too bad or the quarantine measures get too strict, bringing the disease out to other countries through porous borders.
It already is a humanitarian disaster. There, question answered so let’s continue the rest of the discussion.
I say this because not only are people dying of ebola, but the effect on the healthcare systems in countries like Liberia has caused people to start dying of lots of other very treatable diseases and medical problems, for example appendicitis and child birth. While severe complications and death from these relatively easily treated problems certainly happened before, now it is basically a complete breakdown of their already limited healthcare.
With Ebola crippling the health system, Liberians die of routine medical problems
Even if there was immediate action sparing no expense by multiple industrialized nations, things will get worse before they get better.
And when you throw in the breakdown of the infrastructure and the food supply chain, things look even more bleak. In 2013, 35.8% of Liberians were considered victims of malnutrition, lacking access to essential nutrients and facing starvation. With the quarantine of northern Liberia preventing traders from bringing in food and farmers from harvesting crops, food prices in some areas have already risen by as much as 500%. For people already living on the edge, this has placed even the most basic food staples, such as rice, far out of reach. This is a crisis that absolutely requires outside intervention, not only in treating ebola and illness, but in making food and potable water available to everyone.
I keep expecting someone to frame a rosier outlook (as contentious as this board can get), but it seems like the prognoses are depressingly similar. Will the world actually commit the resources before this turns into an honest-to-god local apocalypse?
The US commitment seems like it could help, but way more relief is needed.
I’m morbidly curious about how far the world will let this go. We let close to a million Rwandans die in an outright genocide without doing a thing about it. The one thing the current victims have going for them is that there may be enough fear in the international community to motivate greater intervention, but at the stage where this begins to take a greater spotlight in world affairs (when tens of thousands have died) is probably too late.
If rule of law breaks down completely due to lack of food and supplies, then the meager amount of treatment facilities may fall in the chaos and that just might be the end of it. International forces could theoretically restore order, but I doubt anyone will commit troops to an ebola-zone to do so.
Yeah, it’s a lot easier to ignore genocide. It’s not contagious.
CDC estimates a worst-case scenario of 1.4 million cases (corrected for underreporting) in West Africa by January (link).
Now that’s at the current treatment level. We’re ramping up massively, right? Well, right now, Medecins Sans Frontieres is rejecting cash donations because they don’t have the manpower to actually use the money, and countries seem unwilling to commit the people. So there’s money available, but without actual boots on the ground (and it seems like it will take a massive number of boots), we’re going to lose the race to contain this thing. A few countries have made a significant contribution, but still not enough and not fast enough.
The single case in Dallas doesn’t mean much as long as the CDC does its job, as it’s a natural consequence of what’s going on across the ocean. The U.S. is likely safe from Ebola making it into the wild; we’ll get isolated cases, but the CDC and the nation’s hospitals should be in full alert. But if it doesn’t help focus our efforts on stopping the disease in Africa (or worse, distracts us), then we’ll be doing our fellow humans across the pond a great disservice.
Liberia and Sierra Leone at least are facing utter ruin, and it seems like we’re right at the brink of not being able to contain it anymore and letting the disease have its way with the entire populations of those two countries.
In 1996, Tom Clancy wrote a novel in which terrorists get their hands on an ebola victim, weaponize the virus and spread it throughout the US with ease. The follow-up novel dealt with ebola being weaponized further through the addition of something else hardy (cancer genes IIRC). It stands to reason that these best-selling novels have been read far and wide and may have provided inspiration for real attacks, just as Debt of Honor was probably at the top of the reading list of the 9/11 hijackers. (In DoH, a pilot who is upset with the US crashes his jetliner into the Capitol building and decapitates the entire US government)
Now there are a lot of terrorists these days who hate the US and the western world in general. And they are a lot closer to Africa than we are. There has got to be at least one ISIS/Khorasan/Al Qaeda terrorist out there who knows some virology. This virus is a big payday for them, a cache of bio-weapons that grows larger by the day.
I’d love to be wrong but I think there’s a threat.
I VERY, VERY much doubt there is a single virologist among them.
It doesn’t even matter, scientific breakthroughs in viral engineering are not made by a mad scientist working alone with no equipment in a half blown to bits building. Getting a sample of ebola wouldn’t even be that hard, weaponizing it? HARD. I’m not going to tear into a novel but inserting human cancer genes into a virus is not something done in a basement.
The terrorists are a lot closer to Liberia because…why? They aren’t white? They are all kind of vaguely third world?
Liberia is a former American colony. English is the official language. They are mostly Christian. They are closer physically to Rio than to Syria. The flag is a modified American flag. All poor brownish people aren’t just some big giant borg mind out there, you know.
It’s amazing how ethnocentric people can be. Sure, there’s a tiny chance we’ll have an actual outbreak in the U.S. (either due to natural spread or why not, terrorism), but Americans and their media are so focused on that hypothetical rather than the hundreds being infected every day in West Africa, sentenced to die horrific deaths for something largely out of their control (i.e. you can’t blame someone who has compassion and cares for their infected relative and is ignorant about germ theory).
We spend so much money, resources, and lives on our foreign adventures, and despite all that we’ve lost, Iraq (our biggest recent adventure) is worse for our having done so. Here in West Africa, this is a foreign adventure that is unequivocably a good thing that will save lives and increase your reputation, and the First World nations are dithering because I guess it’s scarier to lose some guys to a disease than to enemy bullets?
Would it help if we pretend Ebola is a terrorist firing nano-bullets at us?
Excuse me? What is your problem?
I will not tolerate an accusation of racism. I was talking about physical distance. That and that only. You are the one who decided to fly off the handle and make this a discussion about race. I have no interest in that discussion. You have no idea what my actual opinion is so don’t put words in my mouth.
Sorry, I’m just trying to make sense of the idea that “the terrorists” can be characterized as “close” to Liberia, even in a relative way. Damascus, to pick a sketchy place, is 3,500 miles from Monrovia. AQIM, Boko Haram and maybe Shabab are closer, but none of them have any connection to the area and none are in any shape to be running sophisticated biological weapons programs.
Germ theory? Even a bronze age understanding of disease is a sufficient basis to understand when someone tells you that touching sick people or their fluids makes you sick. The problem is not people who don’t know how disease works, it’s the ones who think they know how disease works but don’t and are stubbornly resistant - sometimes murderously so - to being corrected.
I think it’s more people who know how disease works, but are still unwilling to abandon their wives and fathers and sisters to die alone without care, or lay unburied after death.
Don’t be so sure. From the Bronze Age to the present, it’s still exasperatingly common for people (and not just in places like Liberia) to attribute disease and other misfortune to deities, witchcraft, and the like, rather than something real like germs.