If we learn nothing else from the current Ebola outbreak, it will be that even epidemics are political and that ethical people—not uncaring markets—will give us the solutions for future problems.
Ebola, a virus whose horrific symptoms include profuse vomiting, diarrhea, and internal bleeding, has spread quickly across West Africa. Only months after the first reported case of Ebola in Guinea, on September 30, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported the first Ebola diagnosis on US soil—now there are two more.
Unfortunately for its victims, Ebola first appeared in 1976 in two of the poorest countries in the world: Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That epidemic claimed 300 lives. In the last few months alone during the current epidemic, more than 9,000 people have been stricken with Ebola and more than 4,500 of those have died. The unprecedented size of the current Ebola epidemic certainly merits the degree of global alarm raised about the issue. But we must ask ourselves: why has Ebola struck (again) with such a vengeance?
Since 1976 there have been tens of identifiable outbreaks of Ebola, yet no effective and approved preventative vaccine or treatment has emerged. It makes no market sense to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product that would treat a disease that affects only a few hundred people—people who might not be able to pay full price either—every few years. The U.S. has not been immune to these kinds of value judgments. Drastic budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control directly stymied the development of vaccines and treatments for Ebola. Ultimately, market logic—promoting what is commercially profitable and cutting what is not—hurts not only our own preparedness to face global epidemics, but also values the lives of the light-skinned, wealthy and powerful more than marginal groups.
Meanwhile, we still joke about Ebola, a dual recognition of Ebola’s apocalyptic grimness but also the improbability of Ebola affecting us. “Don’t bring it back,” we cracked at friends who traveled by air this fall break. We have the luxury to make such jokes, but the people of West and Central Africa do not.
Even when we begin to pay attention to Ebola, it is largely to disingenuously politicize the epidemic. With election season fast approaching, politicians have begun using Ebola as an instrument to further their own political ends. Whether to criticize the overreach of the Obama administration or to criticize the CDC, the dialogue misses the point, which should be an examination of the global inequalities the current Ebola epidemic has exposed. Most noxiously, preexisting xenophobic sentiments in the U.S. have leveraged Ebola-hysteria to encourage stopgap, anti-migration measures for anyone coming from Africa. Fear of the black patient has allowed racism to enter the discussion on Ebola. This kind of politicking is irresponsible and unproductive.
We were heartened to see Duke taking steps towards addressing the challenge of Ebola. Most notable is the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator’s (SEAD) new Ebola Innovations Challenge, which asks students to come up with business and policy solutions for the epidemic. However, while laudable, SEAD reads too little, too late. Ebola, and other commercially non-profitable diseases like it, is more than a game for students to sharpen their egos on. University initiatives like SEAD should incentivize non-market solutions to little addressed diseases so we can prevent the next epidemic. Otherwise, we are condemned to a cyclical historical forgetting.