We’ve made the Ebola crisis worse

It is the stuff that nightmares are made of, and day by day it is getting worse. The Ebola epidemic, says Dr Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), is now “the greatest peacetime challenge” since the Second World War. Yet her own organisation’s tardiness, partly caused by cuts, together with reductions in – and misuse of – funds elsewhere, are largely responsible for Ebola spiralling out of control.

Officially 7,178 people have caught the horrific disease in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal: 3,338 have died. The toll is greater than the combined total of 25 previous outbreaks of the haemorrhagic fever in the 38 years since its discovery near Congo’s Ebola river. And that is certainly a gross underestimate – many more are sickening and dying unknown in remote villages.

It’s just the beginning. At present the numbers of people infected are thought to be doubling in under 30 days – and the blue-chip US Center for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that, if Ebola goes on accelerating, 1.4 million West Africans could have contracted the disease by the new year.

Whole nations are close to collapse. Sierra Leone’s economy is reported to have deflated by 30 per cent. Schools in affected countries are closed. Harvests rot in the fields. Hospitals are so overwhelmed that they are not merely turning away Ebola cases, but also people stricken with other deadly diseases such as malaria. Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, has warned of impending economic disaster.

The one saving grace is that the infectious disease spreads with difficulty, through bodily fluids, which means it can be contained with strong enough measures even in Africa. This is why Western health systems are confident that they can prevent an epidemic at home. But this week Anthony Banbury, chief of the UN’s Ebola mission, raised the possibility that the virus could mutate to spread by air, like flu.

So why was this epidemic not contained long ago, like previous ones?

It didn’t help that it hit countries with few medics: Liberia was left with only 30 doctors when its civil war ended in 2003, compared with 2,000 beforehand. It is also down to the poorly resourced countries to report outbreaks; this one was not identified until March, three months after the first victim is thought to have caught Ebola from a fruit bat. But previous, controlled episodes of the plague also occurred in poor African countries.

This time, however, the world was slow to react. Kent Brantly – the American doctor who survived the virus – says that pleas for international help “appeared to fall on deaf ears”. The charity Médecins sans Frontierès (MSF) – on the ground from early on in the outbreak – recalls “screaming” at the WHO “to gear up and scale up”, without success. The organisation finally declared an emergency in August; senior officials admit it was far too slow.

That may have reflected budget cuts. When the financial crisis struck, WHO – funded by world governments – had to cut nearly

$1 billion from its planned two-year budget. Staff charged with responding to disease outbreaks were slashed by 35 per cent; funds for it by half. Emergency experts used to fighting Ebola in Africa were reduced from more than a dozen to three. Only one remained at headquarters to oversee all haemorrhagic diseases.

This week, the Commons International Development Committee condemned the Government for cutting aid to Liberia and Sierra Leone, saying this may have helped compromise their health systems. Channelling money through the EU was even worse, it found. Brussels had given $60 million for health in Liberia over the past two years, but the country’s treasury had hung onto almost all of it, spending only $3.9 million on its real purpose. Britain seemed little concerned.

In all, the crisis has revealed huge deficiencies in how the world responds to epidemics. On Thursday governments met in London to work out how to improve their response radically; Britain has already promised an extra £125 million. But Médecins sans Frontierès say that while “everyone in their intentions is moving fast”, progress in the field is “at the speed of a tortoise”. It is increasingly agreed that the window for effective action is closing fast.

Even if we do enough, fast enough, to contain the outbreak, this is most unlikely to be the last plague to threaten the world, and the next may be more infectious and spread more widely and rapidly. It is time to accept that global threats can only be tackled globally and that – as someone said – we are all in it together.

New houses mustn’t ruin our glorious old towns

They are among our greatest glories. So it is good to see English Heritage’s chief executive speaking up to defend historic towns. Simon Thurley warned they could be forced to treble in size with “huge slabs of identikit housing”, tarnishing the settings of these priceless jewels of wood, brick and stone.

As he said, whichever party wins the next election is bound to “put its foot on the accelerator” to build more houses. And it is absolutely right that it should do so. The lack of homes at a reasonable price is one of the great scandals of our time; and house building is one of the best ways to stimulate the economy.

But the right houses must be built in the right places – and here the Coalition has an appalling record, with historic towns from Durham to Dorchester, Chichester to Chester already under threat, just as countless villages are besieged with speculative developments. Labour could well be worse, less constrained by protests from the shires.

New housing should be concentrated on brownfield land. And a new designation, like Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, is needed to conserve our most precious towns.

How a pet will keep you warm from beyond the grave

Here, perhaps, is a consoling thought. When it’s lights out for Fido, Fluffy or Flopsie, they can help – er – keep the lights on.

The Dutch company Rendac Son (slogan “Improvement by Nature”) says it specialises in “the innovative and sustainable processing of particular organic waste and animal by-products”. Stripped of the eco-jargon, this means it turns dead pets into biofuel.

Owned by a Texas firm called (would you believe?) Darling Ingredients International, it gets through a staggering 400,000 tons of animal corpses each year. “The cadavers,” so the company’s Tom Doomen gruesomely told the online magazine Vice, “are grinded, burnt, sterilised and divided. That leaves us with water, animal meal, and fat. We use the fat as fuel for our own machines and we turn the animal meal into biomass energy which we sell to energy companies, generating enough to supply 55,000 households for an entire year.”

By Dutch law, all farm animals not used for meat must be processed like this – and so are half the country’s pets. Unsurprisingly, crematoria don’t like the competition. “Why draw the line there?” says the head of one. “Rationally speaking, we could also consider throwing human corpses into the machines. But we are not going to do that, are we?”

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