Epidemics are increasing in a world disrupted by climate change, neocolonialism and agribusiness. However, the great powers and laboratories continue to sacrifice global health to the logic of profit.
The cruise was having fun on the MV Hondius, while Argentina and Chile were experiencing record hantavirus cases. No titles at 8 p.m. But what was just another epidemic in a poor country boards a cruise ship and finds its way to rich countries.
Contact cases hospitalized in 23 countries, the specter of Covid which reappears and the press headlines. So goes the capitalist world, which wants to ignore that its globalization signals the return of pandemics and only thinks of looking at them when they threaten its profit centers, hoping that closing the borders will be enough. Climate change, massive deforestation, the growth of gigantic megacities, the construction of veritable factory farms, with herded and genetically standardized animals, favor expansion, mutations and the crossing of the species barrier of infectious diseases.
One Health
Everything tells us that the health of ecosystems, animals and humans is linked…: One Health, one health.
Capital is disrupting ecosystems, making humans, goods and vectors circulate at a speed previously unknown. But even as these upheavals signal the return of pandemics, it abandons entire territories and destroys systems of health and global solidarity. Trump, the main donor, has left the WHO, and the World Organization for Animal Health is financially drained.
With climate change and the transport of old recycled tires from Asia, the tiger mosquito is colonizing Europe and France, with indigenous cases of dengue or chikungunya every summer. The H5N1 avian flu is circulating massively in dairy cow and chicken farms in the United States, with an increasingly worrying potential for adaptation to humans. Mpox has fallen off the radar, but continues to circulate in Central Africa, without massive vaccine deployment.
Return of Ebola to the DRC
As soon as reassured about the hantavirus – contact cases in isolation, absence of mutation increasing transmissibility – WHO declares “a public health emergency” for Ebola hemorrhagic fever in the Republic Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in the province of Ituri. The viral strain is particularly transmissible and deadly, with no treatment or vaccine to date, in a cross-border mining region undermined by armed groups, state corruption and ruined hospitals. The closed airport and the collapsed Nizi Bridge make access difficult.
For months, Doctors Without Borders has been pleading for the rehabilitation of this airport, through which its aid passes to the 900,000 South Sudanese refugees living in camps that lack everything. Mining companies and neocolonial looting occupy a central place in the crisis in Ituri. Because if a large part of small gold mines is controlled by armed groups, it is the large mining companies, such as AngloGold Ashanti, denounced by Human Rights Watch, which benefit from the millions of dollars made from gold looting.
Massive deforestation linked to the international timber trade and global warming are destroying agricultural land, encouraging population displacement and violence, particularly against women, while destroying local solidarity. A failed state linked to neocolonial pillaging, a refugee crisis, a disorganized civil society: everything combines to make this Ebola epidemic explosive.
Ebola has been raging since 1976 in the DRC. We are in 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. This did not interest the big laboratories. So there is an urgent need to develop tests and vaccines. But Covid and mpox have shown that even the existence of vaccines is not enough…: they are too often reserved first for rich countries, or social conditions make their distribution extremely difficult in countries undermined by neocolonialism…!
At the UN, the president of Doctors Without Borders denounced “the global coalition of inaction” in the face of Ebola. It was in 2014. And Marie-Paule Kieny, Deputy Director-General of the WHO, admitted the reason: Ebola fever is “typically a disease of the poor in poor countries, in which there is no market” for pharmaceutical companies. It’s still relevant today. The profits of trusts and the austerity of states come before the health of the world.
Frank Prouhet
