A review of THE COMING PLAGUE: NEWLY EMERGING DISEASES IN A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE by Laurie Garrett, published in 1994. CHAPTER 7: N’ZARA: LASSA, EBOLA, AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD’S ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POLICIES
An instrument of biological warfare
While his colleagues in Atlanta anguished over Swine Flu damage control, Joe McCormick was content to finally have a chance to uncrate several thousand pounds of laboratory equipment and build his remote Lassa Fever Research Unit in Sierra Leone. He wanted to find out just how widespread Lassa virus infection was in the West African Mastomys rat population. “While I’m at it, might as well check for antibodies to Marburg and Ebola.” Not long after settling in and starting up laboratory operations, McCormick was summoned to a top secret meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia to learn that four Soviet scientists were interested in Lassa research, only one of whom was a bona fide scientist. The CIA grilled McCormick after every contact with the Russians convinced that both sides in the Cold War feared the other was developing Lassa as an instrument of biological warfare.
A one-in-ten chance of surviving
In the late 1970s Sierra Leone had a population of 4 million people, representing a polyglot mixture of more than ten tribes, at least five distinct language groups, and three mutually hostile religions. Most Sierra Leonians survived on marginal or subsistence agriculture. What wealth existed in the country was concentrated in the very few hands that had a role in the management of the nation’s diamond or bauxite mining and exportation industries. The average baby born in Sierra Leone in 1977 had about a one-in-ten chance of surviving a host of infectious diseases and chronic malnutrition and reaching adulthood. Infant mortality was high: 157 of every 1,000 babies died before their first birthday. For those older children and adults who fell ill, scant curative facilities were available. Fewer than 150 doctors, many of them foreigners, treated the 4 million citizens of Sierra Leone in a patchwork of hospitals and clinics nationwide that could provide only about 4,000 hospital beds.
Thus, Freetown was created
Though the British prided themselves on leaving the stamp of English civilization upon their colonies, less than 10% of the Sierra Leone population was literate when the country gained its independence in 1961. in 1878 Britain had founded the nation of Sierra Leone where no such country had previously existed, carving out boundaries for a slave-free state. Though the British continued to play an active role in the slave trade well into the nineteenth century, the government was compelled by domestic English dissent in the late eighteenth century to provide a safe haven for escaped slaves and the descendants of interracial couples. Thus, Freetown was created.
In debt
Nearly two hundred years later, the creole descendants of those freed slaves were a distinct but tiny minority population of some 60,000 people, representing the bulk of the well-educated elite of the country. By the time McCormick and Webb set up their remote Lassa laboratory, Sierra Leone was coming out of a ten-year period of political instability and violence, had established a one-party republic, and was so far in debt to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other, largely British, creditors that annual national revenues were diverted from the people and projects in desperate need nationwide to pay interest to lenders in London, Geneva, New York, and Paris.