Ebola and the Nigerian Difference

In a news conference today a representative of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States suggested that Nigeria appears to have beaten back the Ebola outbreak that came onto its shores from Liberia. The case of Nigeria appears to demonstrate that there should be nothing fatalistic or apocalyptic about this Ebola outbreak - in can in fact be beaten back. The problem in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, as the CDC representative suggested, is not so much that Ebola is dangerous as it is that the means of curbing the spread of the virus is woefully lacking. The dread of the virus increases where the means to arrest its spread are lacking. Thus, the havoc this virus is causing in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, should not be attributed to the viciousness of the virus itself but rather to the lack of infrastructures to deal with it. The many deaths resulting from the spread of the virus are therefore preventable. The problem is not with Ebola itself because the virus can be contained, as Nigeria has demonstrated, but with the poor infrastructure available to contain the spread of the virus. There will always be deadly viruses; we just need to be prepared to deal with them when they break out. That is the difference Nigeria has made in this case.