bob-swanepoel-interview2 digital science Virgin Media
Now gorillas are endangered by Ebola, and there's talk of vaccinating them.
Yes, several candidate vaccines are giving very good results. Gorilla vaccination will be a challenge. But with people there are also huge problems. There tend to be long intervals between Ebola outbreaks, and then the next one's a different strain. One of worst things you can do is go in with a vaccine that doesn't match the current strain and won't give immunity. If you vaccinate someone today and he gets the disease tomorrow, then local people will start killing you.
It must get frustrating battling Africa's disease problems.
We have increasingly sophisticated technology. The problem is maintaining these things. In the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, when we got to Kikwit there was just one old paraffin fridge we couldn't get to go below 10 °C. Even a dipstick test has to be kept cool in that climate, or soon there's fungus growing all over it.
One problem is that the whole health structure can be blind to certain problems. It's not just HIV denialists: there are denialists of every kind. I've dealt with rabies in the backwoods, and village people say: "Our forefathers knew how to deal with it. You just kill the dogs." Then there's one country - I won't say which - that utterly refuses to let us survey it for the ticks that carry Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever. It's surrounded by countries that have them, but it doesn't want to know because then it would have to do something about it.
How does disease control in Africa compare with that in the west?
It's not that people aren't trying. In a hospital in one of the most godforsaken places in Sierra Leone they have 600 suspected cases of Lassa fever each year, and they all need stringent infection control. But they cope. If the fanciest hospital in the US had just six in a row they would be on their knees.
The tragedy is that rich countries are siphoning off medical people. In the DRC there was a scheme that gave epidemiology and public health bursaries in the US to 15 people. Not one came back. When 70 medical people died at Kikwit, many others left. Then these places that are backward become worse - it's a spiral. The solution all comes back to the standard of living and, like Nelson Mandela says, education.
At your own personal level you do what you can do, what's obvious for you to do, what feels good. I'm amazed at how many people are so shallow, only interested in their Mercedes and nothing else. I'm not Mother Theresa but I think I've made some efforts.
Are there more new diseases out there?
If you walk into the forest in Africa, no matter how far in you go, you'll find spent shotgun cartridges. Man has penetrated everywhere. Yet by one estimate we've only picked up 3 per cent of the nasty viruses. There is a catalogue of 500 insect-borne viruses: 36 cause serious disease, the rest we know about only because someone caught a million mosquitoes to see what was in them. Who knows what they might do?
