Ebola: Success or Failure?
The Frontline documentary that we watched in class gave the impression that Ebola was by-and-large a failure on the part of the international community, and for others by ordinary Africans themselves. However, there is ample reason to believe that the response to Ebola produced several positive outcomes as well.
Ebola was, by many standards, a preventable disease. The epidemic apparently started from a bat coming into contact with a group of Guinean kids playing in the woods. In the documentary, there were the videos of hundreds of people with bare feet and hands walking around, touching infected bodies. This left the native of West Africa in a tough position of security issues: choosing between the ontological security of sacred customs at the risk of dying, or choosing human security in getting treatment, at the risk of spiritual detriment. Though no one is to determine for certain which course of action is better, the disease did nonetheless spread through these practices.
Some of these issues, though, may actually be beneficial to disease prevention. For example, the West African branch of the WHO, which was given authority to contain the virus, had no previous experience in treating Ebola patients, and those who did were medical experts in the West, far removed from the day-to-day suffering of the victims. That said, now that such an outbreak has occurred, the WHO in West Africa now has experience in treating the Ebola virus. This also has the effect of localizing an administration that can responsibly and swiftly treat patients moving forward, should another outbreak ever occur.
More importantly, the failures of the international community to respond effectively ended up masking how successful the containment actually was. Beyond several isolated cases, the virus did not spread to the United States or other parts of the West. The outbreak ended after less than a year. And at the end of it all, only several thousands of people died from Ebola. Though those deaths were tragic, the virus thankfully did not reach the alarming level of a pandemic such as the Influenza outbreak in 1918-1919, which killed tens of millions of people across the globe.
As such, blame for the failure to contain Ebola cannot be 100 percent laid on the organizations or doctors who did not respond quickly enough. In this, the natives unknowingly spread the virus by exposing themselves to it, though they had ontological security issues to consider. Government bureaucracy did play a role in prolonging the epidemic, and Ebola could have perhaps been prevented almost entirely had they sorted their issues out before the outbreak. However, the Western response to Ebola was effective enough to prevent something that could have become far worse.
I agree with the view of the outbreak that says that the failures ended up to be learning opportunities. Now that we have seen something like this, especially in the less developed East, we know that there is more to be done to prepare. Further, I also agree that it can be looked at as a success, in a way, because its spread to the West was limited. But at the same time, the reaction everyday people in the United States was very troubling and proves that we are not ready for something like this. The reaction, due to the nature of the societies, would be different in the US than it was in Liberia, but it still would lead to an exaggerated spread of disease and hysteria.
ReplyDeleteMuch can be learned from the ebola outbreak in West Africa. I agree with your statement that the blame for the spreading cannot be placed on the doctors and volunteers alone. The culture of the area was extremely conducive to the spread of the disease and unknowingly to the people. While still not ideal, I agree that it is successful that the outbreak did not last more than a year. Similarly, it is important that WHO received this experience, were another outbreak to occur. I agree that there are many lessons we can learn from the experience and that it should not be viewed as a complete failure.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that there were certain cultural factors that worsened the spread of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and agree that WHO has learned something from this experience. However, I just hope that they learned things such as how to better inform people in the region -in a way they trust- and mobilize action to cull such a pandemic sooner, rather than continuing old habits of meetings with little to no action taken. I can only hope that WHO and other such organizations can, like the West African people did closer to the Ebola outbreak's end, learn how to adapt and change their behavior to better respond to and resolve such issues in the future.
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