How worried should Britian be about the Ebola outbreak?

An African villager arrives home after a trip through the jungle, nursing an animal bite. A few days later, we see the same man, sweating and feverish, submitting himself to the care of local doctors. Gradually, the circle widens: the man’s wife, his friends, the doctors themselves, all start to display symptoms. Cut to an international departure lounge, where a Western businessman or holidaymaker is knocking back paracetamol, sure that this nagging flu will have cleared up by the time he gets home.

The fear of pandemics is one that haunts our culture – and it is one that has been given new life by the events in West Africa, where the Ebola virus has claimed almost 4,000 lives. In keeping with the horror-movie narrative, the disease is starting to creep out of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, with cases reported in Spain and America. Yesterday saw the death of the first suspected British victim, in Macedonia, and the announcement by the Government that it is tightening screening procedures at airports. On Wednesday, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Thomas Frieden, warned that Ebola may become “the next Aids” – a killer not of thousands, but of millions.

Yet those who have seen this movie before may also feel they know how it ends. When SARS – severe acute respiratory syndrome – appeared in Asia in 2002, we were told that it had a 25 per cent chance of killing “tens of millions”. There were calls for borders to be locked down, and new arrivals showing symptoms to be locked up. But despite a spike in sales of surgical masks, and the hurried cancellation of thousands of holidays to Hong Kong and Thailand, the disease ended up killing only 775 people worldwide.

It was a similar story in 2009 with swine flu. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, warned that 65,000 Britons could die, and the government duly spent more than £1.2 billion to prepare for the viral apocalypse. Yet while the disease was incredibly contagious, infecting millions worldwide, it turned out to be relatively mild. In Britain, only 457 people died – a significant number, but 25 times fewer than the 12,000 who are carried away by normal seasonal flu every year. To make matters worse, some experts later claimed that the £424 million spent on stockpiling 40 million doses of Tamiflu had essentially been wasted: its average effect, they said, was to shorten the disease’s duration from seven days to 6.3 (a finding which its manufacturer, Roche, disputed).

With the Ebola virus, too, there are reasons to believe that the impact in Britain will be relatively limited – which is why, to its credit, the Government appears to be resisting calls to panic. True, the virus is not only horrifically nasty, liquefying the internal organs of those who catch it, but devastatingly effective. 

This article is courtesy of the Telegraph.