Containing Ebola Virus in West Africa.

In a piece in the Harvard Business Review blog, the CEO of Ogilvy Public relations, Christopher Graves, makes the case that communication is the key to containing the spread of Ebola in West Africa. He argues that “Whether the world’s scariest outbreak of Ebola can be managed may come down to communications. Can governments, NGOs, and doctors communicate with very different audiences – with accuracy, agility, and ingenuity? Can they be convincing?”

While communication may be key in containing the spread of Ebola, Mr. Graves misses the big picture here. It is simply that the health infrastructure in these countries is overstretched, that even effective communication alone cannot do the trick. To start with, the number of public health staff in the affected countries is simply low, staff that would have been used for the very communication that Mr. Graves argues for. The hospitals themselves do not have any decent equipment, and the pay for the few specialized health workers is pitifully low. When you have health workers themselves fearing that they may be infected, and people refusing to go to hospitals fearing that they might contact the virus while in hospital, then you know that you have a crisis on your hands. Already, Nigeria and other countries in West Africa, as in the rest of Africa, are facing a migration of qualified health professionals.  For instance, there are more specialist Nigerian doctors in the West than there are in Nigeria itself. The case is no different from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the other affected countries.

What’s needed then is for the affected countries, and the African countries in general, to increase the quality and training of its health personnel. For instance, when Ethiopia realized that it couldn’t compete with the Western countries, it increased the number of trained doctors and nurses by four times. This had the effect of keeping the numbers of these health professionals uniform, even after the others had left.

Still, even after the Ebola virus is contained, African countries must increase their efforts in curbing common diseases such as malaria, HIV, and the other communicable diseases. Currently, Africa relies too heavily on the efforts of outsiders to curb common diseases, which is welcome in times of crisis, but should not be the basis for long term health infrastructure development of the continent. Otherwise, history rhymes, and African countries will continue to have an escalation of preventable diseases.