The cost of stopping Ebola

The current death toll of nearly 5,000 means more people have been killed in the present ebola outbreak than in all previous ones put together. If you're wondering why the stricken countries in West Africa have been finding it so difficult to halt the epidemic, the Economist has crunched some interesting numbers.

Experts reckon ebola could be brought under control if 70% of the sick could be got into clinics or treatment centres where the spread of the virus can be halted, but to deal with the kind of case numbers being predicted for the next few weeks, that would require tens of thousands of beds.

Medecins Sans Frontieres and other charities, as well as governments like those of the US and the UK, have been busily building, but the WHO calculates that running just a 50-bed ebola hospital would cost nearly $1 million a month. No wonder the UN says a 20-fold increase in aid is needed.

And it's not just the buildings. The three countries where most people have died - Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia - have only a few hundred doctors between them, and some of those have now died of the disease. 

Road accidents becoming no 1 killer

Fascinating piece in the Economist of Jan 25 on road accidents. At present, they kill about 1.3 million people a year – not far short of the number who lose their lives to tuberculosis, but the World Health Organisation expects the total to reach nearly 2 million by 2030, well outstripping tb deaths and catching up with AIDS as a killer.

The biggest increase is expected in the poorest countries, with deaths almost tripling. One of the main reasons being that when money is invested in new roads, little is spent on safety.

Already, road crashes are the main cause of death worldwide for people aged 15 to 29, with most victims men and boys. In poor countries, most of the people killed are pedestrians, while in developing countries such as Thailand, it tends to be motorcyclists.

In the developed world, better safety measures have seen road deaths actually being reduced. New York now has fewer than it did 1910, while Sweden has halved the number since 2000, cutting them by 80% since 1970.

*My updated website - http://www.disasterhistorian.com/index.html

'War on drugs' - holes and digging

Last week it was revealed that, in addition to the 60,000 people known to have been killed in Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’, another 25,000 are missing.   Now the Economist has produced some startling statistics concerning drugs globally.

Since 1998, when the United Nations held an event entitled ‘A drug-free world – we can do it’, consumption of cannabis and cocaine has risen by about 50%, while used of opiates has more than trebled.   The illegal drugs industry now has an income of about $300 billion a year.   That is equivalent to about one eighth of Britain’s gross domestic product – everything the country makes.

The UN reckons that 230 million people worldwide use illegal drugs.   Back in 1919, a well-meaning American government banned alcohol, and created a huge criminal industry.   For the last half-century, well-meaning governments across the world have done the same thing for the drugs business.

A famous British politician, Denis Healey, once said – ‘when you’re in a hole, stop digging’.  It was good advice.

Munitions explosions

While I was away one of the stories I missed was an intriguing item from the Economist on September 29 about explosions at ammunition depots.   Something I have already blogged about on many occasions – see below.

Last month saw a blast at a weapons store at Afyonkarahisar in Turkey that killed 25 soldiers, while in March, in one of the worst munitions accidents ever, 250 people perished in Congo-Brazzaville, as debris was flung over a 2 mile radius.

Since global records started being kept in 1995, 4,600 people have been killed, and last year was the worst single year with 442 deaths in 46 explosions.    Many stores are located near towns, and those in Africa, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union are often poorly run.

Perhaps the deadliest munitions disaster of all time happened in Nigeria in 2002, when a fire began at an open air market in a barracks and then spread to the armaments store.   Perhaps 2,000 people perished, many of them crushed to death in the panic to escape.

 (See also my blogs of May 27, 2010; Feb 17, 2011; March 5, May 20, July 25, and Aug 2, 2012.)