Other view: With Ebola, chaos also is contagious

Faced with a brutal and wily adversary, President Barack Obama on Tuesday ordered a scaled-up military assault. Not on terrorists in Syria, but Ebola in West Africa.
The president dispatched about 3,000 American troops to help build 17 treatment centers. The Pentagon will establish a military command center in Liberia to coordinate the civilian response to the epidemic. American military health experts will help train thousands of African health care workers. American aid workers will help distribute supplies and information to families there.
The U.S. - and, we hope, the rest of the world - is getting serious about confronting this plague blazing through Africa. The official Ebola toll as of late Tuesday: 4,985 cases and 2,461 deaths. Some experts, however, suspect the actual death tally is much higher. And the rate of Ebola infection is growing at an alarming rate. The number of Ebola cases could spike to 20,000 in a matter of months.
Ebola “is spiraling out of control,” Obama said in a speech at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s more than a humanitarian crisis. It’s “a potential threat to global security,” Obama said.
In other words, chaos is contagious. As Ebola spreads, it disrupts everything - transportation, commerce, government services, security. It is not hard to imagine how that instability could be exploited by jihadists or others intent on stirring trouble. That doesn’t stop in West Africa. When chaos spreads, no country is immune.
Unlike in past Ebola outbreaks, health officials haven’t been able to contain the virus to rural villages, isolated from major population centers. Africa’s population has grown and more people have migrated to cities. The virus is breaking into metropolitan areas and is much harder to control without meticulous public health systems in place. Africa doesn’t have those systems. There is so little protective gear in Liberia, for instance, that one U.N. official there says her colleagues have instructed locals to use plastic bags as protection against the lethal virus, Reuters reports.
This epidemic hasn’t directly threatened the U.S. yet and may not. But as University of Minnesota infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, that is not a reason for complacency.
Virologists are “loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private” a frightening possibility, Osterholm wrote. Ebola could mutate to become transmissible through the air. In other words, a virus now spread through direct contact with bodily fluids could go airborne and spread much farther, faster. Just breathing around an Ebola victim would be hazardous.
“The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years,” Osterholm wrote. “Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice. If certain mutations occurred ... infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico.”
Ebola is now killing about half its victims. It is encouraging that drug companies are speeding vaccines and potential cures into the field. This isn’t the typical lengthy, deliberate process, but an urgent response to an urgent need.
The world’s largest donors and organizations need the same urgency. They have pledged millions to combat Ebola but have been slow to deliver the checks, the Wall Street Journal reports. Contributions are still falling short of the $600 million the United Nations estimates will be needed for hospital beds and other supplies to slow this juggernaut. And people are dying.
Africa - and the rest of the world - can’t wait for new miracle drugs or a vaccine. Ebola is on the rampage. It can be defeated. It has been before. This time, however, it will take a massive and urgent worldwide effort, starting now.
Chicago Tribune