The politics of diseases and their cures

Malaria remains a world killer my any standards, but many of those it kills are Africans and most of the trial medicines are produced in the West!

The politics of diseases and their cures

By Opoka Christopher Arop

The world is a place where competing interest tussle it out everyday and with it the brave giants make the grass suffer. Africa’s experience with diseases remains unparalleled. Perhaps we are only behind Eastern Europe and pockets of Asia’s island nations when it comes to getting disease cures late though we provide willing guinea-humans for such drug tests. My worry has been with the source of these diseases, which many scientists, including our very own Africans will argue that, most likely originated somewhere in dark Africa. This argument has been plausibly convenient to ears for reasons beyond anti-black African racism. The heart of the debate and this is often where the meaningful decisions on vaccines and disease treatments are made, lies with the super powers yet again.

Dominance of the west in military might and technology have not been enough to these worlds of which we have never been a part, except with a scornful laugh at the United Nations, a shopping picnic for African despots. The west does not only offer the best of everything good and bad, it also invents the sickness Africans have and acquire.

Ebola continues to ravage parts of West Africa, although, the same deadly viral disease was controlled in parts of northern Uganda in the 1990’s and in parts of the former Zaire in 1960’s and 70’s. It was the white man who diagnosed symptoms of Ebola then, and it is the Canadians yet again who have come forward with an untested vaccine. Some quick questions if I may with your permission; when these Canadian scientists were hoping to test this vaccine, if Ebola, an Africa sickness, had not hit West African countries? And just how did these doctors think about an Ebola vaccine that has actually worked without testing it?

This vaccine ZMapp, a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies, was developed at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg. Of the seven people with Ebola who received the treatment, two died and five lived. Because clinical trials have not been conducted, it’s impossible to say scientifically whether ZMapp saved his life, but Dr. Omeonga is convinced it accelerated his recovery.

In his many years of medical work in Liberia, Congo and elsewhere, Dr. Omeonga has suffered bouts of malaria and has seen almost everything in tropical medicine. But nothing, he says, feels like Ebola. He was feverish, vomiting, diarrheal and unable to eat. “You can’t even get off the bed. When you get Ebola, you only think you’re going to die.”

 

The 53-year-old surgeon feels even more certain that ZMapp was crucial in saving a Liberian health worker, Kyndy Kobbah, who was in a coma in critical condition when she received it. “If it wasn’t for ZMapp, she wouldn’t have made it,” he said.

The debate on the appearance of vaccines at the perfect timing especially during the onset of a deadly virus should rightly raise a billion eyebrows. If what I have seen in Hollywood blockbusters about what happens at the Center for Disease Control or even the dealings of the Food and Drug Authority in the United States, the sudden appearance of a virus in some pocket of Africa is suspect in itself. We have heard that the United States has stocked enough viruses for any likely biological warfare. Remember the Anthrax cases!

The current Ebola epidemic is a good wake-up call for Africans and even South Sudanese. In early 2011, I had the chance to travel to Mombasa for a workshop on petroleum reporting. However, my luck seemed elsewhere after I had a good experience chatting for a little-known doctor from the West, who was very passionate about what the rest of the world did not know about HIV/AIDS. This doctor explained with very credible examples, the very simple facts that I as a journalist felt stupid that it had not occurred to me to ask these same questions. And ever since, I have read extensively on viruses and followed vaccine developments and viral epidemics with stern interest.

“The history of HIV and AIDS in the USA began in 1981, when the United States of America became the first country to officially recognize a strange new illness among a small number of gay men. Today, it is generally accepted that the origin of AIDS probably lies in Africa. However, the USA was the first country to bring AIDS into the public consciousness and the American reaction undoubtedly contributed to the establishment of AIDS as one of the most politicized, feared and controversial diseases in the history of modern medicine - a reputation that stands today,” reads a statement on http://www.avert.org.

The debacle we find ourselves having to confront is as real and we must be courageous and resolute. “Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in the U.S and Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in France still hold a grudge about who discovered HIV/AIDS, least to bring up is the question of the quality of the virus isolation they performed in identifying without any doubt what the HIV/AIDS virus looked like.

The seemingly magical appearance of ZMapp when Ebola has broken out in Africa is good timing, but more suspect than ever. It has reminded me of one of the best investigative journalism stories I once read on the Thalidomide drug.

Thalidomide had been discovered by accident in 1954 by a small German company called Chemie Grunenthal. Grunenthal had sold the drug all over the world, aggressively promoting it as an anti-morning-sickness pill for pregnant women and emphasizing its absolute safety - it would harm neither the mother nor the child in the womb.

The latter guarantee turned out to be tragically wrong. The drug was eventually withdrawn in 1961. But it was too late to prevent some 8,000 babies around the world being born with thalidomide deformities.

In Britain, the drug was marketed by the giant liquor company Distillers. Though there had been a terrible tragedy, governments declared that since the testing and marketing of the drug had met all the legal requirements of the time, what had happened was not the companies' responsibility.

We must therefore be careful as a nation to be better prepared about the causes of diseases and subsequent vaccines that appear one beautiful morning. All drugs are poisonous to our body, a doctor friend told us once and he advised healthy eating as a remedy to some sicknesses and diseases rather than introducing toxic chemicals into our blood. The cost of fighting HIV/AIDS related infections would be cheaper if all donors diverted billions of dollars spent on HIV/AIDS research and pharmaceutical experiments into agricultural research and better feeding for Africa’s impoverish populations. But America, France, Britain know too well where the business end of the deal is. It is a profit from diseases venture that has collusions of unimaginable proportions similar to what President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed the Military Industrial Complex in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961.