Wednesday, Oct 22, 2014 08:30 AM EDT
It's time to look at America's perverted
sense of death, health and prevention -- and how we're spending our
money
Robert Hennelly
This
week stateside, the edge may be off the Ebola story for the U.S. news
media, as those people in Dallas who were close to the late Thomas Eric
Duncan emerge from their 21-day quarantine. The Obama administration has
appointed an Ebola czar and the military is pulling together a kind of
infectious disease SWAT team that can helicopter in the next time a
“world-class” American hospital fumbles an Ebola case.
Glad that’s resolved.
What
a human tragedy it will be if we fail to grasp what are the existing
pre-conditions that set the stage for this unprecedented global outbreak
of Ebola.
Missing from the wall-to-wall coverage of the global
Ebola crisis is a root-cause analysis that shows how unfettered free
market global capitalism and our obscene spending on the military both
play a part in creating the environment for this latest outbreak and the
ones that are sure to follow.
Annually the world spends more than
$1.7 trillion on the military. According to the Wall Street Journal the
world spends a whopping $27 billion on the world’s public health. Keep
that obscene imbalance in your mind the next time you see pictures of
Liberians bleeding out in the street.
No missile killed them, but our greed and global death-oriented spending priorities have left fingerprints on all these bodies.
Here
in the U.S. we spend close to $700 billion on the military annually,
roughly 20 percent of the federal budget, equivalent to just under
$2,500 per capita. Contrast that with our foreign aid for things like
public health where
we part with
just $19 billon, or .6 percent of the federal budget, just $61 per
capita. Twenty other nations actually give a higher percentage of their
gross national product in non-military aid to nations in need than we
do.
Our military spending squeezes out so much that needs to be
done both at home and abroad. And there are lost opportunity costs of
not doing what needs to be done, like seeing to it that places like West
Africa, the epicenter of the latest Ebola outbreak, have a basic public
health infrastructure.
This latest global pandemic shows just how
yesterday our “homeland security” threat–based security matrix is. In
the jet age of hop-and-a-skip Ebola, it feels fatally provincial.
Ultimately, our essential homeland is planet Earth.
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As
President Obama does his best to shift back and forth from commander in
chief of the war on terror to global public health advocate, he is
going to find maintaining the public’s trust, both here and abroad,
essential but difficult. For quite a while now the U.S. brand has been
tied to its myopic prosecution of the the war on terror, even if it
killed innocent civilians and put the global public health at risk.
How
else does one explain the CIA’s fraudulent use of a public health
vaccination program in Pakistan to harvest DNA from households they
suspected of harboring Osama bin Laden? As a direct consequence of the
CIA’s subterfuge bin Laden supporters targeted several public health
workers administering polio vaccination for assassination.
Although
that particular CIA strategy did not help the U.S. achieve its ultimate
goal, there was major blowback. The U.N. had to shut down its polio
eradication efforts in Pakistan, one of only a handful of countries in
the world at the time where wild polio transmission still happens. So
severe were the potential consequences that in January of 2013 deans of
the 12 leading American schools of public health wrote President Obama
directly, taking the CIA to task. “This disguising of an intelligence
gathering effort as a humanitarian public health service has resulted in
serious collateral consequences that affect the public health
community,” read a press release
put out along with the letter.
A
week later Lisa Monaco, the White House’s top counter-terror and
homeland security expert, wrote back pledging the CIA would not repeat
the ruse.
But the damage may have been done, especially in the
parts of the world where U.S.-based pharma multinationals’ vaccination
products have long been viewed as suspect and with the same skepticism
expressed by vaccination opponents stateside. By in the spring of this
year the World Health Organization was reporting a resurgence of polio
centered in the Middle East and Africa that “constitutes an
extraordinary event and a public health risk to other States for which a
coordinated international response is essential,” WHO
warned the world.
“If unchecked, this situation could result in failure to eradicate
globally one of the most serious vaccine preventable diseases.”
For
global context, keep in mind that in 1979 polio had been eradicated in
the United States, but experts say maintaining that status requires high
vaccination rates here and an aggressive program around the world. In
an increasingly mobile world, the Centers for Disease Control warns that
without a coordinated international effort “scenarios for polio being
introduced into the United States are easy to imagine.”
No doubt
this reality creates a dynamic tension between public health and
commerce that is so present in the current “fly–no fly” Ebola debate. We
have a media-induced near religious belief that only through unfettered
global free trade and travel can a brighter tomorrow dawn. We think we
have conquered the natural world but it can still kick us in the ass
with fatal results. We have failed to grasp even the basic consequences
of the mobility many of us take for granted. We are blind to the social
and ecological costs exacted on the people of Africa by transnationals
in the hot pursuit of everything from bauxite to crude oil.
Despite
our 21st century genius we lose jet airliners and killer epidemics can
percolate for several months in remote places like West Africa,
impoverished by an extraction industry like the mining of bauxite used
to make the aluminum we need for the planes we fly and the latest
high-tech gadgets we depend on to stay connected. Our pressing question
all too often is, Can we get an upgrade?
Suffice to say most
Americans have no idea where this virulent Ebola strain has come from or
how many people it has already killed. Media figures vary. Laurie
Garrett, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations, told the PBS
News Hour this week that for the first time officials at the World
Health Organization had conceded the “bad news” that they had no real
data from Liberia. Garrett says she estimates the actual
Ebola death toll is between 15,000 and 16,000 deaths.
There is expert consensus that the Ebola tide has to be turned where it originated. We can’t just hermetically seal our borders.
According
to the World Health Organization, “ground zero” for the outbreak was
“in the remote Guinean village of Meliandou” where the borders of the
West African nations Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone all meet. The
first fatality, according to WHO, was a 2-year-old boy who died two days
after he became sick around Christmastime of last year.
Within a
matter of weeks his 3-year-old sister, mother and grandmother all had
succumbed to what was still at that point a mysterious disease to the
local doctors who were unfamiliar with Ebola because it had previously
been only associated with countries in Central Africa. In one of the
most medically underserved places in the world, local doctors were all
too familiar with the regular outbreaks of infectious diseases like
cholera and malaria but were baffled by what they were facing.
“Following
the young boy’s death, the mysterious disease continued to smolder
undetected, causing several chains of deadly transmission,” according to
WHO’s account. “Who could have ever guessed that such a notorious
disease, previously confined to Central Africa and Gabon, would crop up
in another distant part of the continent?”
It was not until March
of this year that WHO officially posted the Ebola outbreak advisory. For
months there was lots of public health hand-wringing. Experts were
lured into complacency when local outbreaks seemed to wane, only to
resurge with a vengeance, decimating a part of the world that, despite
its great natural resource wealth, lacks basic public health
infrastructure.
For Africa in the age of unfettered global
capitalism, the leverage is still with transnational corporations that
can easily exploit the corruption and political instability that grips
so much of the continent. “With 24 percent of the world’s infectious
disease burden, Africa has only 3 percent of the world’s health
professionals, with massive shortages of physicians, nurses,
technicians, health administrators and planners,”
writes Jennifer Cooke, author of “Public Health in Africa.”
Any
effort at coming to understand Ebola has to be pursued holistically. As
reported earlier this month in the Digital Journal, there are expert
estimates that West Africa has lost as much as 90 percent of its virgin
forest lands
to human activities including farming and mining. Scientists believe there is a corollary between
deforestation and the increasing frequency and severity of Ebola outbreaks.
Ebola
is a zoonotic disease, transmitted from animals to people. As the
population grows and human settlement expands into the shrinking
tropical forests, the local population, which survives off bush meat, is
increasingly exposed to the disease present in species like fruit bats
and chimpanzees. Such was the conclusion reached in the
2012 report “Ebola Virus Outbreaks in Africa and Present” published in the Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Medicine.
At
the same time a never-ending cycle of political violence in the region
makes it impossible to achieve the stability needed to establish and
maintain the public health infrastructure necessary for a traumatized
and often at risk population. All too often African leaders decide it’s
more critical to spend money to buttress their military for their own
self-preservation, as opposed to investing in the public health of their
constituents. Add into the mix a terrorist group like Boko Haram and
you have a civil society constantly under duress.
Historically,
for Americans and Europeans, Africa was a place to get slaves, free
labor. In modern times it is a place from which we extract diamonds,
gold, bauxite, oil, whatever, at the lowest possible price, so as to
make the most profit. It is just business. If you can add to your mass
consumer market in the process, that’s fine too. But, overwhelmingly,
the majority of Africans are left out of the global free trade
wealth-creating machine that is fueled by Africa’s natural resources.
As
for the U.S., with the fall of the Soviet Union and after Sept. 11, we
have increasingly asserted ourselves with drone attacks and strategic
military raids in Africa aimed at disrupting terrorist networks.
Despite
all the rhetoric about being interconnected it is hard to get the
developed world to really have skin in the game over the long term. Yes,
President George W. Bush’s focused efforts to spend billions to fight
HIV-AIDS in Africa was a bipartisan success that made a difference for
millions.
Yet last year the Washington Post reported that
President Obama actually became the first president since Reagan to back
off the U.S. commitment to fighting HIV-AIDS, slashing
hundreds of millions of dollars from the program.
What
this Ebola outbreak has to drive home is the reality that U.S. aid to
support public health in Africa is not a selfless act of charity but one
of self -preservation. Over the decades of African relief ads on
late-night TV we may have become inured to the image of starving and
disease-stricken children. That’s not to say the world has not made
progress. Consider that in 1990 the World Health Organization reported
that around the world 12.6 million children under age 5 died. That’s
almost two Holocausts a year.
By 2012 that was down to 6.6 million
dead children and about half of them were from sub-Saharan Africa. But
as we have seen with the death of the 2-year-old in Guinea last
Christmas, the loss of just one can have repercussions felt around the
world.
(Credit: AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)
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