The first victim of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was almost certainly a 2-year-old boy in the small village of Meliandou in southeastern Guinea. Since his death in December 2013, the disease—whose previous outbreaks killed at most hundreds of people, and generally in rural areas—has infected thousands of people across West Africa, as well as a handful of people around the world, due to porous borders, ill-equipped health systems, and a faulty international response. The virus has drawn comparisons to one of history’s greatest biological killers: the plague, which killed tens of millions of people from China to Europe in the “Black Death” of the 14th century.
As it happens, toward the end of 2014, a country on the other side of Africa was coping with the real thing. In…
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Foreign Policy (Digital) - 1 Issue, January - February 2015