Deadly distrust

Gregg Mitman's article in the September 17th New England Journal of Medicine, "Ebola in a Stew of Fear," is unfortunately all too prescient. Dr. Mitman highlighted "the ecology of fear" in Western Africa. Fear is present on both the part of Westerners (scared of Africa's yellow fever, malaria, Ebola, its mere "different-ness"), and by native Africans (of whites' history of colonization and slavery, of medical exploitation dating back well over a century). Fear of each other.

This history of fear, the cultural legacy of decades of mistrust of both Western people and their medical science, played a role in the murders of 8 people working on the Ebola outbreak in Guinea--journalists, medical officers, local administrators, and a preacher who were just trying to educate locals about the virus. The hostile crowd first threw stones at the team, and ended in their brutal deaths. The steps in-between have not been reported.

This is the extreme end of the science and medical denial continuum. We can scoff in America and attribute such horrors to the "brutal, savage Africans," who cut their daughters and rape virgins to cure AIDS, as I've unfortunately already seen in some Twitter comments--some of our notions of "them" not so dissimilar from American colonists of centuries past regarding the slaves they once owned.

We can accept this scape-goating and ignore the West's own modern-day culpability, with our fake vaccination campaigns that have left others dead in the aftermath; with our movies and popular culture depicting Africans as the West's guinea pigs, and our shady pharmaceutical dealings that make that characterization all too believable.

No, it isn't always a battle of Africans against Westerners. In South Africa, former President Thabo Mbeki was deceived by false claims about the relationship between HIV and AIDS that he had read on the internet, suggesting that HIV was not the cause of AIDS, and that  Western science should be distrusted in favor of traditional herbal remedies recommended by his health minister, such as garlic and beetroot. Because of his suspension of Western medical treatments, an estimated 330,000 South Africans died prematurely from HIV/AIDS between 2000 and 2005 , and at least 35,000 babies were born with HIV infections that could have been prevented.

Denialism kills. Distrust kills. Fear kills.

Here in the U.S., Natural News, a site run by the self-dubbed "Health Ranger," Mike Adams, ran a piece this past summer suggesting that journalists and scientists who defended genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) were similar to Nazis, accelerating "heinous crimes being committed against humanity" and collaborating with an "with an anti-human regime," and that such individuals should be named as such for future crimes:

"Just as history needed to record the names and deeds of Nazi war criminals, so too must all those collaborators who are promoting the death and destruction caused by GMOs be named for the historical record. The true extent of their collaboration with an anti-human regime will all become readily apparent once the GMO delusion collapses and mass global starvation becomes an inescapable reality.

I'm hoping someone will create a website listing all the publishers, scientists and journalists who are now Monsanto propaganda collaborators. I have no doubt such a website would be wildly popular and receive a huge influx of visitors, and it would help preserve the historical record of exactly which people contributed to the mass starvation and death which will inevitably be unleashed by GMO agriculture (which is already causing mass suicides in India and crop failures worldwide)."

Adams is similarly anti-vaccine, and currently is featuring on his website "11 horrible truths about Ebola the government doesn't want you to know." These "truths" include suggesting that infected individuals should avoid hospitals, and that citizens everywhere should prepare for the inevitable quarantine at gunpoint.

The worst part of Adams' misinformation of this type is that it doesn't stay within the borders of the U.S.--misinformation on Ebola epidemiology and quack cures like those Adams promotes are also being spread in African nations via Facebook pages and other types of social media. 

Denialism kills. Distrust kills. Fear kills.

Because of distrust of Western medicine, a recent article noted that parts of Africa have better vaccination rates than many wealthy neighborhoods in Los Angeles--and as a result, 10 babies died in a 2010 outbreak of whooping cough in California.

The deaths of the workers in Guinea show this fear and denial writ large; the purposeful killing of those only wanting to help their local and global neighbors in the face of a terrible epidemic. Those murdered are the latest victims of the most malignant form of distrust. They will not be the last.