Now It’s a Threat?

A case of Ebola appearing in the United States and another in Spain was enough for a disease that nobody cared about to become a world threat. Now, both the European Union and President Barack Obama are asking the world to “drastically” strengthen the fight against this deadly disease.

How paradoxical it is to note that while Ebola took more than 4000 lives in West Africa, none of the Western countries could care less that it was spreading throughout this immense continent. Of course, what was it going to matter to them if it was a virus that affected miserable villages, people without purchasing power to invest in medicine, a continent overwhelmed by disease and wars. Only when the disease knocked once on the doors of the big countries—compared to four thousand fatal cases—did it become a world threat overnight.

Now that alerts have been set off even in our country of Colombia, it is worth wondering where were all these multinational pharmaceutical companies and their governments, which for 40 years were not interested in searching for a cure for this disease. One only needs to take a look at Germán Holguín’s book, “The War on Generic Drugs,” to understand why these multinational pharmaceutical companies are not interested in developing vaccines or medicines to attend to the health crises of third world countries.

“We are not in the business to save lives but to make money. Saving lives is not our business,” is one of the compelling phrases uttered by a senior executive from Roche, which rescues Holguín in his book. That is precisely what now proves that Ebola has turned into a global threat overnight. Until two weeks ago it was a disease of some poor black people that nobody cared about and now it is a threat to humanity and first world governments are clamoring for a vaccine.

It is there, in the multinational pharmaceutical companies’ sole desire to fill their pockets with millions of dollars, that we find the reason for which tropical diseases like dengue, leishmaniasis, chikungunya and other similar ones today have no cure in sight.

Marjin Dekker, senior manager of Bayer, explained it without compassion: “We didn’t make this medicine for Indians… we made it for western patients who can afford it.”

Perhaps then, now that Ebola has arrived at their doorstep, we can expect a vaccine to be developed.