A week of ‘what if’s’

There are signs virus is inside the body, flexing muscles to letting loose fever that presages beheadings, floggings

Conversations over the last week have had common threads, and the sclerotic politics that is gumming up the works, having died of boredom as a conversational topic, it was time to give Ebola and the Islamic State (IS) a run around the track.

Among the people I know, there is a high level of awareness of the havoc being wreaked across the countries of West Africa by the Ebola virus. People understand the deadly illness. They ‘get it’. It is a part of the lives of many and there are few who have not experienced it at first hand or cared for somebody who is seriously sick. So, Ebola is not a mystery but the what-if question is on many minds. What if there is an Ebola case in Pakistan?

In the age of the global village, that is not as far-fetched as it may sound. There will be migrant workers from the subcontinent in places where Ebola is rampant. Could one or more catch it? They could. Could they bring it back to India or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or Pakistan? They could. So what if they did?

There is a slow intake of breath at this point and some downcast glances and a bit of hmmm-ing and some uncomfortable shrugging and muttering. Bad… it’ll be bad — really bad. Pakistan and the other countries of the subcontinent are extremely vulnerable to something like Ebola — or any other illness like a mutant flu strain such as that which killed 50 to 100 million — a fifth of the global population in 1918. Basic health services would be overwhelmed in days, a fortnight at most. But relax. There are no reports of Ebola anywhere in Pakistan. Nothing.

But IS… now that is a very different matter, another virus for which nobody has developed a vaccine. It is spread by human-to-human contact and which can be fatal in many cases, permanently disabling in most. It is among us and spreading.

Any sign of emergency teams fanning out across the country to counter the outbreak? No? Well, how about public service announcements on the media, an SMS information service warning the populace as to what symptoms to look out for and how to counter them? No? But, it is showing up in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, wall chalking, car stickers and leaflets distributed. There are signs that the virus is inside the body and flexing its muscles preparatory to letting loose the fever that presages the beheadings and floggings and amputations and persecutions and the driving out of millions from their homes — and are we all absolutely fine with that?

Well, now you ask… errr… I suppose we are, really. Most of us, anyway. Not the Twitterers or the Facebookers, oh dear me, no. They have all got their undies in a bunch, as usual, wringing their hands in cyberspace and signing petitions right, left and centre and generally acting like somebody is listening to them. Which of course, they aren’t because most of the population doesn’t have access to clean water, education and an indoor toilet never mind the interthingies.

Nooo dearies, there is no fear of the masses pushing back against the IS virus because their immune systems are already wrecked by decades of food insecurity, grinding poverty and deprivation at every level. It can travel the country, hopping from chai khana to mosque to madrassah at will, squiggling itself into open ears that have no active filters and then embedding itself in the synapses of myriad minds that are like brand new whiteboards’ in many cases, just waiting for the man with the dry-wipe marker to come along and give meaning to life.

Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, and before you know it, the IS is installed and up and running, no need to reboot the system and too late to develop a deterrent firewall or run the AV programme. Game over.

So, there we have it. Waiting on the doorstep is one of the deadliest diseases in purely physical terms than modern man has ever faced on the one hand, and on the other, an already-active infection that is no less lethal. Hmmm… let’s talk about politics instead, shall we?

Published in The Express Tribune, October 9^th, 2014.

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