{"id":10498,"date":"2015-07-29T06:38:39","date_gmt":"2015-07-29T11:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10498"},"modified":"2015-07-29T06:38:56","modified_gmt":"2015-07-29T11:38:56","slug":"neoliberal-ebola-the-agroeconomic-origins-of-the-ebola-outbreak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10498","title":{"rendered":"Neoliberal Ebola: the Agroeconomic Origins of the Ebola Outbreak"},"content":{"rendered":"

Neoliberal Ebola: the Agroeconomic Origins of the Ebola Outbreak<\/a><\/h3>\n

The notion of a\u00a0neoliberal Ebola<\/a>\u00a0is so beyond the pale as to send leading lights in ecology and health into apoplectic fits.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one of bestseller David Quammen\u2019s\u00a0five tweets<\/a>\u00a0denouncing my hypothesis that neoliberalism drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa. I\u2019m an \u201caddled guy\u201d whose \u201cloopy [blog] post\u201d and \u201cconfused nonsense\u201d Quammen hopes \u201cdoesn\u2019t mislead credulous people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientific American\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Steve Mirksy\u00a0joked<\/a>\u00a0that he feared \u201cthe supply-side salmonella\u201d. He would walk that back when I pointed out the largeliterature<\/a>\u00a0documenting the ways and means by which the economics of the egg sector is driving salmonella\u2019s evolution.<\/p>\n

The facts of the Ebola outbreak similarly turn Quammen\u2019s objection on its head.<\/p>\n

The virus appears to have been spilling over for years in West Africa. Epidemiologist Joseph Fair\u2019s group\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0antibodies to multiple species of Ebola, including the very Zaire strain that set off the outbreak, in patients in Sierra Leone as far back as five years ago. Phylogenetic analyses meanwhile\u00a0show\u00a0<\/a>the Zaire strain Bayesian-dated in West Africa as far back as a decade.<\/p>\n

An\u00a0NIAID<\/a>\u00a0team\u00a0showed<\/a>\u00a0the outbreak strain as possessing no molecular anomaly, with nucleotide substitution rates typical of Ebola outbreaks across Africa.<\/p>\n

That result begs an explanation for Ebola\u2019s ecotypic shift from intermittent forest killer to a protopandemic infection infecting 27,000 and killing over 11,000 across the region, leaving bodies in the streets of capital cities Monrovia and Conakry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Explaining the Rise of Ebola<\/strong><\/p>\n

The answer, little explored in the scientific literature or the media, appears in the broader context in which Ebola emerged in West Africa.<\/p>\n

The truth of the whole, in this case connecting disease dynamics, land use and global economics, routinely suffers at the expense of the principle of expediency. Such contextualization often represents athreat<\/a>\u00a0to many of the underlying premises of power.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Neoliberal Ebola: the Agroeconomic Origins of the Ebola Outbreak The notion of a\u00a0neoliberal Ebola\u00a0is so beyond the pale as to send leading lights in ecology and health into apoplectic fits. Here\u2019s one of bestseller David Quammen\u2019s\u00a0five tweets\u00a0denouncing my hypothesis that neoliberalism drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa. I\u2019m an \u201caddled guy\u201d whose \u201cloopy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[19,7627,5493,223,6996,872],"class_list":["post-10498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-agribusiness","tag-agroeconomic","tag-counterpunch","tag-ebola","tag-neoliberalism","tag-west-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10499,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10498\/revisions\/10499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}