A few weeks ago – perhaps no more than a
month, on every TV news program there was extensive coverage of the Ebola outbreak
in West Africa. We saw pictures of health workers dressed in their alien
looking protective outfits, scenes of West Africans collecting bodies and
various medical people talking about the need for more help from the west. If
you watched the news, it was immediately obvious that there was a medical
crisis that was not going to go away on its own. There were reports that the disease was
spreading at an almost exponential rate and that we (the collective rich
nations of the world) needed to something. And needed to do it now. Of course that point was not
new. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)
had been saying that since the late spring. We just had not been listening. It
wasn’t newsworthy enough.
More recently much of what little news
there has been on the Ebola outbreak has been focused on how the developed
countries of the west have been dealing with the public’s media induced paranoid
fears of getting the disease. Canada has, for example, in spite of condemnation
from world health organizations, has created quarantine rules that are harsh and
not at all relevant to the prevention of the disease spreading. But there are no more pictures on our TV
screens of people dressed in strange yellow suits or dead bodies being buried
in mass graves. A stranger to our world would perhaps believe that the lack of
news would indicate that we are well on the way to eradicating the problem on a
worldwide basis. Unfortunately that naïve and sheltered being would be wrong.
According the most recent morbidity and mortality
report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the
problem has not gone away. As of yesterday over 14,000 people have been
diagnosed and over 5000 people have died. While the number of new cases is 100
fewer than the previous reporting period, we are a long way from having any
sort of control of the virus and its spread.
While I can appreciate the fact that those
who produce and write the news assume that the average Canadian has the attention
span of an underachieving knat, there are some of us who in fact can focus of
something for an extended period of time. There are some of us who actually
want to know what is going on in the world. The Ebola crisis has not gone away.
In all likelihood it is not going to go away anytime soon. It will not go away
without our investment of time, money and people. It is, unfortunately a reality of the world
that we live in that we will not invest in those things unless we are reminded
and yes nagged and nagged until we collectively agree to do the right thing.
