Letter from a reader
Ebola and the Moral Bankruptcy of Capitalism
August 24, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Dear Revolution:
I've been following news of the horrible outbreak of the Ebola virus in Africa, and wanted to share a few brief thoughts on the way this contagion is being confronted, and being reported in the West.
At least 1,500 people in Western Africa have died excruciating, agonizing deaths caused by the Ebola virus in the past couple of months. Health officials say the actual number is probably far greater. A recent statement from the World Health Organization said : "In parts of Liberia, a phenomenon is occurring that has never before been seen in an Ebola outbreak. As soon as a new treatment facility is opened, it is immediately filled with patients, many of whom were not previously identified. This phenomenon strongly suggests the existence of an invisible caseload of patients who are not being detected by the surveillance system."
People in areas afflicted by the virus have been hit with ferocious repression fueled by rampant misinformation about Ebola. The fact that Ebola is contagious is being used as a pretext to send armed troops storming into vast slums, shooting and beating people, and erecting barricades to keep them penned in. These methods are similar to those used in the Dark Ages of Europe, when religiously based ignorance was almost universal and there wasn't a scientific understanding of how to treat contagious illnesses.
Liberian soldiers assault hungry residents in Monrovia's sealed off West Point slum August 21. Photo: AP
The Ebola outbreak has been deadly and devastating, and is causing huge medical, social, and political crises in several countries now. It has the potential to become a global catastrophe of unprecedented scope. Far from being an “unpreventable medical disaster”, the Ebola out break has revealed crime upon crime committed upon the people by the system of capitalism-imperialism.
The Horrors of Ebola
This virus is named after the Ebola River in Central Africa, where it was first discovered in 1976. There have been repeated outbreaks almost every year since then, killing hundreds of people. People afflicted with Ebola experience high fevers and heavy diarrhea, and, within days, violent bleeding from all body orifices, including the eyes, ears, and nose. Up to 90 percent of the people with Ebola die. Medical experts think Ebola is spread by direct contact with the blood or other bodily fluids of infected people and animals. Corpses of people who died of Ebola still contain the virus and can cause it to proliferate.
The previous Ebola outbreaks occurred in relatively isolated rural areas. Medical and political authorities were able to contain them somewhat. The current outbreak is the first in heavily populated areas along the West African coast. It is also the most widespread and complex outbreak to date.
Ebola has been found in people in Lagos, Nigeria – the largest city in Africa, an urban area with an estimated population of about 20 million people. Many people have died of Ebola in West Point, a slum area of Monrovia, Liberia's capital. Now the entire district has been put under military quarantine, and Liberian soldiers have viciously attacked people trying to get out. National Geographic reported that over one million people in rural areas of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia have been completely cut off from access to food and supplies by military blockades. A doctor with Doctors Without Borders described the situation in Monrovia as “catastrophic” and being in “free fall.”
A relative handful of heroic and courageous doctors and medical workers have struggled to control the spread of Ebola and to treat people with the virus. Many of these people have themselves died. Sheik Umar Khan, the doctor who led the effort to contain Ebola in Sierra Leone, died in late August a week after he was known to have been infected with the virus. A doctor who worked with Dr. Khan said his death was "a big and irreparable loss to Sierra Leone as he was the only specialist the country had in viral hemorrhagic fevers.”
But the measures taken by Western imperialist governments to alleviate this horrific humanitarian crisis have been feeble and aimed at protecting themselves. The outbreak only began getting serious attention from the West when concerns that the virus could spread out of Africa arose. Two Americans associated with Christian ministries in Africa who had Ebola were administered doses of an experimental and expensive drug called ZMapp, which had been “secretly transported to their bedsides in Monrovia” - a move coordinated by their ministry, the pharmaceutical company that manufactured ZMapp, and the U.S. government. When the two had stabilized they were flown to the US. In the US their electrolyte levels and the clotting ability of their blood were monitored closely until they were declared cured of Ebola.
But there is no such monitoring, much less treatment, for people in Western Africa who go to treatment centers. These people receive only a single test – a screening for the Ebola virus – between admission and death or recovery.
The Moral Bankruptcy of Capitalism
The causes behind the rampant, rapid spread of this deadly virus in sprawling urban slums and vast rural areas, and the actions taken (and not taken) by the European and American imperialist countries that dominate West Africa and pharmaceutical corporations in these countries all point to a basic truth. The global system of capitalism-imperialism is responsible in a very direct way for this horrific crisis.
Distribution of medical facilities, personnel, resources, and research is grotesquely lopsided in a world dominated by capitalism-imperialism. The tremendous productive resources controlled by the imperialist countries, and most of the medical research undertaken in the world today, benefit and enrich a handful of people. Billions of dollars funding medical research is poured into developing treatments for ailments and conditions that primarily afflict relatively well off people in the imperialist countries; diseases and conditions that exist primarily in the vast and impoverished oppressed regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are left largely unchecked, under researched and under funded.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that what it calls “neglected tropical diseases” such as dengue fever affect more than a billion people in the world and kill up to 500,000 a year. A study commissioned by the WHO found that between 1974 and 2004, of the 1,500 new drugs that were made available worldwide, only 10 targeted these tropical illnesses.
One expression of this “crime of omission”: since the deadly Ebola virus was discovered in 1976, no drug has ever been approved to treat the disease, and little research has been done. John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health in London, described this situation as indicating “the moral bankruptcy of capitalism acting in the absence of an ethical and social framework.”
An article in the New Yorker on the economics of Ebola research bluntly stated “diseases that mostly affect poor people in poor countries aren't a research priority, because it’s unlikely that those markets will ever provide a return”. The doses of ZMapp given to the two Americans in Liberia may have been the only existing doses in the world. Further, the argument is made that even if the medication existed, it would be too expensive to apply to such a vast population.
However, African people, and people in Asia and Latin America, are used in the experimentation to develop new drugs for use in the West. Harriet Washington, author of the important book “Medical Apartheid”, said in a recent interview that 40 percent of clinical trials for new drugs are conducted in the “developing world”. She said pharmaceutical companies “go to the developing world not because they want to make drugs available for the people there, but because testing is cheaper and quicker, and time is money in testing.”
Washington added, “I always say that although people portray Africans as poor people and speak about their inability to afford drugs, in reality we are the ones who owe them. They are making these drugs possible. They are making development of these drugs possible. They then don't have access to them. So we are actually in their debt. If we have to pay a large amount of money to make Ebola drugs available to these people, that is what we need to do, not only from an ethical standpoint, but from an economic standpoint. That would be economic justice.”
The Ebola virus spreads rapidly, uncontrollably, and in unpredictable ways in sprawling urban slums and vast but heavily populated rural areas. Sanitation, sewage, and water treatment facilities are poor or non-existent for tens of millions of people in these conditions. Adequate medical facilities are even more rare, and most of those are virtually unavailable to poor people; the ratio of doctors to the general population is 100 times greater in the U.S. than it is in West Africa.
African countries such as Liberia and Nigeria were pillaged by Western colonialists, and for over a century by capitalism-imperialism. Vast amounts of wealth have poured into European and US banks and financial institutions from the material riches and the labor of the masses of people in these countries, but the people remain without even the most basic of life's necessities, such as clean water. A hellish scenario has developed as brutally repressive military and police actions by the Western imperialist dominated governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Nigeria have imposed quarantines and curfews on people trapped in disease ridden-slums.
Over the past several decades imperialist imposed austerity measures that have destroyed or undermined much of the traditional agricultural economies of countries in Africa and elsewhere have triggered the largest rural to urban migration in world history. Massive population shifts from the countryside to makeshift urban shantytowns lacking basic needs like clean housing and water in cities like Lagos and Monrovia have created conditions rife with the possibility of massive outbreaks of Ebola and other deadly diseases.
Accelerating climate change could also be a factor in this disastrous Ebola outbreak. The Washington Post reported that a 2002 study indicated that “sudden shifts from dry to wet conditions were associated with Ebola outbreaks from 1994 to 1996 in tropical Africa … As the globe warms, precipitation extremes are projected to increase ... those areas which see precipitation variability increases – with abrupt shifts from extremely dry to extremely wet periods – would be most vulnerable to Ebola outbreaks.”
Disease and death are inevitable. And, even if revolution were to happen all over the world tomorrow, digging up the legacy of imperialist domination of the world and its grotesque, murderous inequalities would take a long time. But there would be a much more widespread distribution of medical facilities, and an understanding of essential hygiene. There would be knowledge of and materials to provide for creating sterile conditions for people with contagious diseases, and methods of protecting those not affected. In cases where medical isolation is necessary, it would be conscious and as much as possible, voluntary. It would not mean leaving people alone and uncared for while they waste away; it would be respectful and caring, not punitive and repressive.
And, while much is not fully known about Ebola – its origins, exactly how it is transmitted, how to treat it, this is different from saying it is unknowable. Medical research and mass education campaigns would raise people's understanding of the virus, and develop conscious approaches about preventing and treating it that were embraced and further developed by masses of people.
That points to another basic fact of this outbreak is that things don't have to be the way they are – where people are shot at, tear gassed, and penned within disease-filled shantytowns when an epidemic begins; where a handful of people receive treatment while thousands suffer gruesome deaths; where diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, which kill over two million people a year mainly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, receive a fraction of the research put into things like developing medicine for use in the U.S. and Europe.
Masses of people could be mobilized, and their conscious activism to contain the disease and cure the afflicted could be joined with the medical expertise of professionals not motivated by profiteering, but by serving humanity. Millions of people could be engaged in the efforts to establish healthy, clean living and working environments rather than squalid slums. Many thousands and tens of thousands of people could learn basic medical skills – liked the famed “barefoot doctors” in revolutionary China, even as efforts were made to train more people with higher levels of medical skill. Research and medical and scientific efforts could be put into researching cures for the ailments tens of millions of people face.
One thing is standing in the way – the system of capitalism-imperialism. Revolution to get as much of humanity as possible to an entirely different place cannot happen soon enough.
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