A year ago, Guinea’s Ministry of Health and Médecins sans Frontières received reports from health centre staff of a mysterious disease killing people in rural southern Guinea. Within weeks of the reporting, the infection was identified, and cases were being investigated in the bordering countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone. A toddler named Emile Ouamouno was eventually identified as the first victim of what we now call the Ebola crisis – a crisis that has since bestowed tragedy on tens of thousands of affected people and families in West Africa.
The extent, impact and grave difficulties in controlling the disease since its identification last March have not been haphazard. Far from it. Rather, the Ebola crisis has revealed the consequences of deep-seated, unequal global social and economic relations that international development, as practised in recent decades, has had a role in creating.
Indeed, if anything positive is to come out of the Ebola crisis, it is the unmasking of this truth.
