WHEN you arrive at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, you will find a long queue of people waiting to get their temperature checked by people in white jackets.
They place something on your forehead and within seconds, they can read your temperature.
If it is very high, you are quickly asked if you are coming from a country where Ebola has been identified.
If you say you are from Guinea or Liberia, where Ebola has killed many people, you are immediately isolated.
The world of scientific journals and research does not know much about the Ebola. More than 10 years ago, the International Journal of Infectious Diseases stated that “Filoviridae is the only known virus family about which we have such profound ignorance.”
Why would they not know about such a fatal disease?
Where did Ebola come from?
Is it possible that Ebola could be yet another one of those fatal diseases associated with biological warfare?
Ebola started in Guinea at the end of 2013 and by March 2014 it had spread across West Africa.
A person can be infected from the Ebola virus through frequent contact with bodily fluids and not through sneezing or coughing on to someone.
A person with Ebola suffers from hemorrhagic or bleeding fever four to 16 days after infection.
He then develops fever, chills, headaches, muscle aches, and loss of appetite.
Then this is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, severe abdominal pain, sore throat and in most cases, there is chest pain.
He will bleed from where a needle has been injected and also in the stomach skin, liver, kidney or other internal organs.
In most cases, the person dies.
The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta first identified the virus in Zaire in 1976.
The first outbreak of Ebola was in 1976 in Zaire as written on the CDC website: “Ebola occurred in Yambuku and surrounding area.
“Disease was spread by close personal contact and by use of contaminated needles and syringes in hospitals/clinics.
“This outbreak was the first recognition of the disease.”
We should ask why the CDC places the origin of Ebola in Africa yet The Journal of Infectious Diseases that stated that biomedical science first encountered the virus family Filoviridae when Marburg virus appeared in 1967.
Other researchers in the leading scientific journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine also noted that Ebola first started in Marburg, Germany.
In 1967 an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever occurred simultaneously in laboratories in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany and it was called the Marburg Virus.
Reports stated that 31 people in German became ill, beginning with laboratory workers who were followed by several medical personnel and family members who had cared for them.
Seven people died before the disease was contained and not heard about again until it reappeared in Africa.
But there was a wide argument against placing the origin of the Ebola in Germany because it seems such a deadly disease can only be viewed as coming from Africa. There is a racial element to the origin.
There was an outbreak of Ebola Reston, Virginia in the United States in late 1989. This was immediately controlled and the news not published widely.
Six years later, Ebola appeared at Kitwit in Zaire and there were 200 fatalities. Since that time, there have been outbreaks in Uganda, Angola, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire and other parts of Africa.
These were quickly controlled.
But the seriousness of Ebola has never been as bad as it is now in West Africa.
A similar type of bleeding caused by anthrax was seen in Zimbabwe during the war with Rhodesian forces.
The racist Rhodesian military unleashed anthrax spores in feeding cakes for cattle. As a result, more than 80 people from the rural areas died during the war.
Many years later, Dr Timothy Stamps, the Minister of Health in Zimbabwe made a link between the anthrax outbreak in Rhodesia, the Ebola outbreaks and the experimentation that had been carried out under South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) programme.
Indeed, it cannot be disputed that the South African apartheid CBW programme’s Project Coast commenced during apartheid had the aim of experimenting with biological agents that could be specifically targeted at Africans.
The United States distanced itself from the experimentation of Project Coast even though the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC of South Africa), Dr Wouter Basson clearly stated that he was “warmly embraced by US intelligence elements.”
The use of biological warfare against Africans is not new.
Harriet Washington wrote a book titled, The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
In this book, Washington shows that Africans faced bioterrorism from the time of colonialism.
The Tuskegee experiment is the most well-known and racist case of using black people as guinea pigs for medical experimentation.
Harriet Washington argued that bioterrorism was a method whereby “chemical or biological agents such as microbes and poisons in the service of terrorism…weapons often consist of disease-causing organisms, usually microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses and fungi.
“These methods of destruction can be both direct and indirect when used against populations.
“The chemical agents can be used to destroy people directly by physically harming them with something such as nerve gas.
“Biological warfare can be used to pollute the environment in which someone lives in order to cut off their source of food plants, livestock, water, or both.”
There has been a redeployment of military forces by the United States, Britain and France to the countries most affected by Ebola in West Africa.
Washington deployed up to 4 000 military personnel to build up hospitals, medical laboratories and treatment centres like they are in a war footing.
This mission has been code-named ‘Operation United Assistance’ and it is being carried out by the controversial US-Africa Command (AFRICOM).
But, should the response be a military one?
Sreeram Chaulia, speaking from India, noted in an article entitled ‘Foreign Pulse: Viral Politics’, that: “As the Ebola epidemic ravages West Africa, a familiar act with troublesome connotations is playing out.
“The international response to the conjoined public health crises in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea is following imperial patterns of tutelage and patronage, wherein each of these three countries has been exclusively taken over by its respective former master from America and Europe through targeted humanitarian aid.
“An erstwhile colony established by American citizens freed from slavery.”
In West Africa, Ebola continues to infect and kill people.
Due to limited recourses many people die without medication and they are not given a decent burial.
Ebola remains a disease not known by any African traditional healer of doctor because it is a new diseases coming from somewhere.
But the question to be interrogated is whether Ebola is one act of biological warfare or an experiment that went wrong.