Of Ebola and other haemorrhagic viruses

16 Nov, 2014 - 06:11 0 Views
Of Ebola and other haemorrhagic viruses

The Sunday Mail

Dr. Timothy Stamps

In the previous sections I have tried to sketch the history and the human importance of the current epidemic (2014).

1411-1-1-STAMPS 2Now, I would like to cover the issue of human tragedies caused by the involvement in the human environment of the range, or family of viruses to which “Ebola” belongs.

Way back in 1913, the USSR was concerned about the human mortality caused at Vladivostok Hospital by a disease they termed haemorrhagic nephroso-nephritis.

Three hundred to five hundred cases are still recorded, annually, and Western physicians first encountered it in the Korean War in 1951-2, through infected United Nations troops.

They also learned that the Japanese had observed an identical clinical syndrome in Eastern Manchuria, which they designated “epidemic haemorrhagic fever”.

All these viral human diseases should, by now, be known as closely related if not identical conditions with the current “Ebola” epidemics.

They have so much in common that only a specialist molecular virologist can tell them apart.

And, they all have this in common: the human host is only an accidental victim of the conflict. They mount against small mammals – rodents, bats, other competitors in the jungles which are its natural habitat.

1411-1-1-STAMPSThat must explain why Big Pharma and their boot-licking GAVI colleagues in Geneva (headquarters of the World Health Organisation) have ignored the challenge of developing a vaccine or producing a cure for human sufferers in the past — not 40 years, but more than 100 years, while they can afford, at public expense, to invent a disease for which they have already developed a pill! That must also explain why the Regional Office of WHO in Brazzaville has kept so silent when more than 5 000 of our colleague Africans have died this year from a disease which they were not supposed to get in the first place.

More seriously, the effect on the individual countries comprising the region may take years and a lot of money to restore the survivors of these outbreaks even to the unsatisfactory — nay, inhuman — levels they had before the beginning of the year.

Let me quote the Economist dated September 13, 2014:

“As Ebola was confined to poor countries, and largely containable with strict infection controls, there was little commercial reason for drug companies to embark on years of costly clinical trials to bring Ebola medicines to market.”

Now, we know what makes the World go round — at least for the policy-makers.

When I was a lot younger, we used to sing a chorus at Sunday School which went something like this:

“Jesus died for all the children,

All the children of the world,

Red and yellow, black and white

All are precious in His sight

Jesus died for ALL the children of the world”.

I suppose we all have to make our choice.

Is it human or commercial progress we want?

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