“Special treatment” for white health workers incurs controversy
The Onion, a news satire organization, used to be more prescient before it went exclusively to web, but every now and again they can still come up with something both piercing and hilarious.
For instance: when “Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away.” Punchy, no?
That mock headline happens to echo a very real sentiment many people have when it comes to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The disease, highly communicable through fluids and almost always fatal, is on a rampage though Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, countries not known for their comprehensive health coverage.
Exacerbating the issue is the reluctance of the local populations to trust western health care conventions. Reports of ambulances being run out of villages because they are believed to spread disease are not unheard of.
Remember, this is Northern Nigeria which, alongside parts of tribal Pakistan and new-age suburban American parents, is one of the few places that has refused to accept polio vaccine, keeping the disease alive to ravage and cripple children for years to come.
Despite that large base of reluctance, the question remains: why are the only people being treated for Ebola white and American? Large pockets of negative sentiment shouldn’t disqualify people from life-saving cures.
The answers aren’t as obvious as you might expect. First, ZMapp, the drug that was given to the two infected Americans, hasn’t even completed safety tests on animals, let alone humans.
Prominent AIDS researcher Dr. Salim S. Abdool Karim, quoted by The New York Times, said that, had the vaccine been sent overseas, the prevailing headline would have been: “’Africans used as guinea pigs for American drug company’s medicine.’”
Second, there isn’t nearly enough of the drug, and producing it is a long and complicated process. It might be months until a substantial amount can be produced, and even then the crisis might have spread farther than that meager amount can help.
While certain pharmaceutical companies, like NewLink Genetics, has received government resources to speed up testing, it could be a very long time until the drug can become mass-produced.
Third, the two infected people (now at Emory University in Georgia) were working for Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian NGO with ties to the company producing the drug, which asked for ZMapp when they heard that two of their employees were in danger.
All in all, the looming practical problems involved with producing and delivering the drugs make a quick and easy (let alone safe) cure almost impractical at this stage of the disease.
And yet, the fear of “Guinea pig” style headlines shouldn’t for an instant stop the delivery of life-saving drugs. The stockpiles of ZMapp and similar drugs, however small, should be immediately sent over to those areas in which outbreaks are smaller and more manageable. If it means saving lives, bad press is the last thing health officials should be worrying about.
The WHO’s announcement that experimental treatments are cleared to send over to the affected areas is a very important development. However, if western drug companies are too slow to act, it won’t matter in the slightest.
As with the AIDS plague, drug companies and the FDA bureaucracy are notoriously slow when putting out drugs, especially when the enterprise is thought to be unprofitable.
And, because Ebola, as a disease, is still “somewhere else” in the American consciousness, it is unlikely that public support will speed up the process.
But the biggest problem with epidemics is their annoying tendency to spread quickly. Unless somebody puts enough effort to stopping its spread now, that “somewhere else” disease might very well get a little more familiar.