If like me you’ve been following Styxhexenmammer on You Tube, you may have encountered his excellent series on the Ebola crisis in Africa. This powerful series of occasional videos charts would could be a major humanitarian disaster as Ebola is found in an ongoing series of every larger towns.

The slow but deadly creep of Ebola from West to East Africa is bringing with it the fear that soon this disease will start to afflict people in other parts of the world should it reach an area with a major international airport. Ebola is nasty, not just because of the way it kills, but because someone could be infected with this disease but not show symptoms until they had made their way to another nation or another continent. It could even end up afflicting those in the many caravans of would be migrants making their way up from sub Saharan Africa to the people smugglers of Lybia and then via sea into Europe.

The tale of Ebola’s march across the continent of Africa is one that much of the mainstream media seems to be ignoring. But it is as much if not more like any other of the afflictions that Africa’s nations and people are cursed with, ignored by the media until it can be ignored no longer.

I fully expect that in the next decade Ebola may not be confined to Africa and may well be a pandemic that could kill as many as the 1918 Flu Pandemic did. Hopefully it will not get to this stage but if it does not and is stopped, then that may be down to groups of German and Israeli scientists who are currently working on a vaccine for some strains of Ebola and the news that they have made some breakthroughs. Ebola is incurable once acquired and it kills 50% of those that it infects. Dealing with this horrific disease is made even more difficult for medical staff as it’s difficult to carry out screening and quarantine procedures in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or other places in Africa where civil society has totally broken down.

The methods of screen and quarantine that worked so well in the West African outbreak a few years back do not work in chaotic war zones. Medical workers are attacked, equipment and vehicles are stolen and violence is done to patients in Ebola isolation camps and hospitals by paramilitaries and these actions not only hamper the control of Ebola but also spread the infection from patients to attackers.

It is the situation on the ground in Africa that often precludes tried and tested isolation procedures that makes an effective vaccine against Ebola so dreadfully necessary. It is far easier to mass vaccinate against a disease than have a disease become epidemic and spread especially if the spread of a disease is aided by chaos and war.

This vaccine will not be rolling out for a while yet, these are very early stages in the research, but the prospect of a vaccine against Ebola looks a lot more likely now than it was in the past. All the various strains of Ebola are the biological monster behind the curtain and the more that can be done to prevent this disease becoming a world wide phenomenon rather than a localised one, the better.