Epidemics are multiplying in a world disrupted by climate change, neocolonialism, and agribusiness. Yet, the major powers and laboratories continue to sacrifice global health for profit.
The cruise ship was having fun on the MV Hondius, while Argentina and Chile were experiencing a record number of hantavirus cases. No headlines at 8 p.m. But what was just another epidemic in a poor country is boarding a cruise ship and finding its way to wealthy countries.
Contact cases hospitalized in 23 countries, the specter of Covid reappearing, and the headlines. Thus goes the capitalist world, which wants to ignore the fact that its globalization signals the return of pandemics and only pays attention when they threaten its profitability centers, hoping that closing borders will suffice. Climate change, massive deforestation, the growth of huge megalopolises, the construction of real factory farms with penned and genetically uniformed animals promote expansion, mutations, and crossings of the species barrier for infectious diseases.
One Health
Everything tells us that the health of ecosystems, animals, and humans are linked: One Health, one health. Capital disrupts ecosystems, circulating humans, goods, and vectors at an unprecedented speed. But even as these disruptions signal the return of pandemics, it abandons entire territories and destroys global health and solidarity systems. Trump, the main donor, has left the WHO, and the World Organization for Animal Health is financially depleted.
With climate change and the transport of recycled tires from Asia, the tiger mosquito is colonizing Europe and France, with indigenous cases of dengue or chikungunya every summer. The H5N1 avian influenza is circulating massively in dairy cow and chicken farms in the United States, with an increasingly worrying potential for adaptation to humans. Monkeypox has faded from the radar but continues to circulate in Central Africa, without a massive vaccination deployment.
Return of Ebola in DRC
While being reassured about the hantavirus – contact cases isolated, absence of mutation increasing transmissibility – the WHO declares an “emergency of public health” for Ebola hemorrhagic fever in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in the Ituri province. The viral strain is particularly transmissible and lethal, with no treatment or vaccine to date, in a transboundary mining region plagued by armed groups, state corruption, and dilapidated hospitals. The closed airport and the collapsed Nizi bridge make access difficult.
For months, Doctors Without Borders has been advocating for the re-opening of this airport, through which their aid passes to the 900,000 South Sudanese refugees living in camps lacking everything. Mining companies and neocolonial plunder play a central role in the crisis in Ituri. While most small gold mines are controlled by armed groups, it is the large mining companies, such as AngloGold Ashanti, denounced by Human Rights Watch, that benefit from millions of dollars from gold looting.
Massive deforestation linked to the international timber trade and global warming are destroying farmland, promoting population displacement and violence, particularly against women, while destroying local solidarity. A failing state due to neocolonial plunder, a refugee crisis, a structurally weakened civil society: everything contributes to making this Ebola epidemic explosive.
Ebola has been raging in the DRC since 1976. This is the seventeenth epidemic. It took forty years and tens of thousands of deaths for a first vaccine to appear in 2019, which is not effective against the current strain. The big laboratories weren’t interested. So there is an urgent need to develop tests and vaccines. But Covid and monkeypox have shown that even the existence of vaccines is not enough: they are often reserved first for wealthy countries, or social conditions make their distribution extremely difficult in countries plagued by neocolonialism!
At the UN podium, the president of Doctors Without Borders denounced “the global coalition of inaction” against Ebola. It was in 2014. And Marie-Paule Kieny, Assistant Director-General of the WHO, admitted the reason: Ebola fever is “typically a disease of the poor in poor countries, where there is no market for pharmaceutical companies.” It is still relevant. Trust profits and state austerity take precedence over global health.
Frank Prouhet
