The nations of West Africa are extremely poor. Many “hospitals” there are
simply places with beds and a few staffers who may or may not have even gone through
medical training. Even before this epidemic, meals were brought in by family
members, not provided by the facility.
Training in the handling of contagious disease is haphazard
to non-existent but, that is not the reason for the tremendous loss of lives. The majority of deaths of care providers have been due to
lack of equipment, understaffing and exhaustion, not negligence. There is not enough protective clothing or personnel to treat, or contain, the infected whose numbers are spiraling out of control.
Guinea,
Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Nigeria
and Senegal are
not countries that attract the attention of the pharmaceutical drug industry. A
majority of their citizens are black and live at a level of poverty
unimaginable in the United States. They have no plumbing, running water and much cooking is done with open fires, not stoves.
People lives can be saved. Research, that should have been done at the first sign of this new disease, is happening. But vaccines for ebola, like all of our medical care, are available only to those from wealthy nations. Two infected an American medical personnel, a doctor and a nurse, were flown
out of Liberia
and taken to Emory Hospital
in Atlanta, quarantined and given
the rare, expensive, experimental drug called Z-mapp, which helped them survive the disease.The infected of Africa, even doctors and nurses have been essentially on their own.
The
pharmaceutical industry has no interest or desire to manufacture complex and costly vaccines when
there is no financial incentive to do so. Poor Africans cannot lay down big
money to cure themselves or their relatives. This would not be a profitable enterprise like
Statin drugs for high cholesterol or Viagra for erectile dysfunction.
The brutally sad truth of the matter is that what
drives the search for cures for diseases is this potential monetary windfall. Even if the big medical think tanks found, say, a cure for cancer, they would make
sure that what was required would be that people take a certain amount of medication every day for
the rest of their lives.This would provide them with continued financial security.
That insures the continued prosperity of Big Pharma.
Stocks rise, doctors get samples and desperate people, without adequate health options, find some way to gather the financial resources required to save
their lives.
Finding a cure for Ebola offers none of these remunerations.
If it did, the epidemic would have been halted in its tracks before it spiraled
out of control. Instead, we all are forced to witness the way the so-called
developed nations of the first world allow fellow citizens in Africa
to be ravaged by a merciless disease!
