On plague in a time of Ebola
Cormac Ó Grádamuch to colonial policies. Today, the resources and knowledge available to campaigns
against epidemics like plague, Ebola, and COVID-19 are global rather than local. In the
case of Ebola, NGOs such as Médecins sans frontières, institutions such as WHO, and
the governments of the countries affected combined in bringing the 2014-15 epidemic
under control.
According to WHO data, the epidemic had caused 11,313 deaths up to mid-October
2015, by which time the crisis had been stayed, with only 23 deaths after the end of
August 2015. The number was very modest compared to, say, estimates of famine
deaths in Somalia in 2011-12 or of deaths from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa in 2014
(0.4 million), yet the global impact of Ebola was far greater.
At the height of the crisis, the Harvard global health specialist Paul Farmer insisted that
“if patients are promptly diagnosed and receive aggressive supportive care ... the great
majority, as many as 90 per cent, should survive”. Easier said than done, given the fears
generated by Ebola and the primitive health infrastructures and rickety economies of
the counties in question. Yet, how many lives might have been spared by a prompter
response or by extra funding remains to be discovered.
About the author
Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor Emeritus of Economics at University College Dublin.
Several of his recent publications, on topics ranging from the origins of the Industrial
Revolution to London’s last plague epidemics, have been collaborations with Morgan
Kelly. His best-known books are Ireland: A New Economic History (Oxford, 1994)
Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A New Economic History (Princeton, 2006), and
Famine: A Short History (Princeton, 2009). His latest is Eating People is Wrong and
Other Essays on the History and Future of Famine (Princeton, 2015). He is past Editor
of the European Review of Economic History.