For immediate information on how to help prevent the further spread of Ebola and how keep yourself safe, please consult and share the Ebola Facts website.
The terrible news that a man—who we now know was an American citizen on his way home to Minnesota—died from Ebola upon arriving in Lagos from Liberia jolted me when I read about it a couple of days ago. Ebola—the disease my older sister used to give me nightmares about after she read The Hot Zone—seemed oceans away when I was researching in Lagos several weeks ago, where car crashes, malaria, and Boko Haram seemed like much more immediate fears.
But now, in a matter of hours, via one single horribly unlucky man on one ill-fated flight, the disease has arrived in Nigeria’s megacity—a city where as many as 20 million or more people live without a reliable source of power, without a well functioning sanitation system, and without much infrastructure whatsoever (a topic I am currently writing another post on). The people of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea along with the health workers bravely working to treat those affected have already suffered horribly from West Africa’s first outbreak of the Zaire strain of Ebola—an outbreak that has killed at least 1,500 people since early 2014—and it is terrifying to think of the virus traveling to a major international city like Lagos where the toll could be even more horrific and from where it could more easily spread beyond West Africa (over seven million passengers traveled through Murtala Muhammed International Airport in 2011 alone).
With fear for my friends in Nigeria in mind, I decided to research more about the deadly disease, and have been writing a summary of the virus’s history because the wikipedia entry didn’t provide much information and because the double mystery surrounding Ebola and Central Africa—still imagined by many in Heart of Darkness terms—is in part why many people find the disease so terrifying. Over the next few days I’ll upload a series of posts on the history of Ebola, so check back or follow Arcade Africa for notifications of those posts.
Murtala Muhammed International Airport (Mark Duerksen 2014)
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