As the death toll in the seven-month-old Ebola outbreak has crossed 4,500 in West Africa, the combined fatalities of the previous spurts in four decades pale in comparison with an estimated total of 2,000.
Here comes the question. Why didn’t the Big Pharma bother to develop a tested vaccine in nearly four decades? The answer is simple: profit.
The epidemic, which the Oxfam aid agency  has termed the “disaster of our generation”, breaks out only rarely, in brief but deadly attacks in impoverished African countries. That small - and poor - market means a very low priority for the global pharmaceutical industry, which normally spends up to $3bn to take a costly drug to the prescription stage.
“Until this West African epidemic, Ebola was not a public health problem and a really rare disease,” says Prof Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976. “There was very little interest in all quarters, not just pharma,” he said.
But with the first confirmed Ebola death in the US at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas on October 8, in a classic case of the callousness of the profit-driven healthcare system that woefully lacks transparency and accountability; the scare that followed in the country; and the isolated cases of infections in Europe, what was once regarded as “an orphan disease,” has now become a global concern.
“If these 2,000 (earlier) deaths had occurred in industrialised countries, things may have been different, but it was 2,000 dead in the middle of Africa, so nobody cared very much,” says Sylvain Baize, in charge of the Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers Reference Centre at France’s Pasteur Institute.
Ebola-driven damage now seems inevitable to Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth. The World Bank has estimated that the two-year economic impact on the region if Ebola is not contained will reach $32.6bn.
There, in fact, is certain xenophobia about the devastating disease with no known cure (a fully-tested and licensed vaccine is not expected before 2015, according to the World Health Organisation). On September 5, the WHO voiced hopes that an experimental vaccine would be available in November for frontline health workers.
Ebola is a deadly and a horrific way to die. But try telling the thousands of infected people and their relatives in one of the poorest regions of the world that “the profit motive produces efficient outcomes in an industry.”
Sure, drug companies didn’t develop an Ebola vaccine because it wasn’t seen to be profitable with few opportunities from a few direct “customers”. In most of West Africa, annual health spending stands at less than $100 per person compared with the US figure of about $8,000. Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia – the hardest hit by the epidemic- have some of the world’s worst maternal and child mortality rates in a rickety health system.
As of October 14, some 4,555 people died from Ebola out of a total of 9,216 cases registered in seven countries at about a 50% mortality rate (the rate can go up to 90% in some cases), according to WHO.
Life-saving medicines are not always just about saving lives. For the Big Pharma, it’s all about protecting their precious bottom lines in the profit-driven market.