The Ebola Pandemic: Meaning, Origins, and the Pathways of Eruption and Spread

Abstract

Is West Africa, general, and Sierra Leone, in particular, 'typical' of communicable diseases such as Ebola? To answer these questions, this chapter begins with the clinical medical definition of Ebola virus disease. It traces the disease's origins and the competing sociocultural, political, and economic pathways of the spread of the disease-from the Congo to Sierra Leone. To epidemiologists these competing pathways are a determinant of the patterns of disease eruption and spread, people morbidity, and fatalities. However, beyond these science-driven facts, is the question of why the already dysfunctional public health sector of Sierra Leone failed to contain the virus. In answering this question, I argue that the dysfunc-tionality of the health sector, and its inability to cope with the outbreak, should be seen from the political functions this 'slow death' of the health sector served in sustaining a system of governance that prospered at the detriment of the people. MEANING: WHAT IS EBOLA? There are a plethora of clinical studies on the behaviours of numerous communicable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and dengue fever, and the pathogens of the various haemorrhagic viruses, including Ebola. These studies were carried out by several specialist institutions, including