It’s Just A Bunch Of Botfo

Tags

Chatbot, ChatGPT

In the long sad story of how we damage information – and the inevitable acceleration of the process by technology – we have witnessed the epic acceleration of misinformation. Once upon a time, misinformation born of accident or ignorance spread from person to person by word of mouth; then it received the boost of technology as it went into print, enlarging the possible scope and audience manyfold. And then the internet made it possible to misinform the world in seconds flat.

If we agree that “misinformation” is accidental, we can distinguish it from the deliberate act known as “disinformation”, where someone is telling lies for a reason – ranging from making themselves seem important, to selling a product, a political idea, a conspiracy theory or other delirious fantasy.

And then there is the nasty backwater once only occupied by the poisoned software known as malware, designed to damage something stored in your computer – or the computer itself – we now have “malinformation”, which can damage you and your reputation, mentally and even physically (when the evil information is advice about drugs that can kill you).

Into this wrong-headed neighbourhood, we now have to welcome a new resident. This is the statistically generated artificial intelligence spewed by chatbots like Lamda or ChatGPT. Entertaining, rapid-fire, and apparently comprehensive, the output of these chatbots is the statistical result of parsing a vast trail of training materials – trillions of bytes of information, good, bad and ugly. Consequently, the chatbots have been trained on mis-/dis-/and malinformation as well as squeaky-clean and perfect information. But equally consequently, we have to take what they produce with a certain ambivalence. What comes out is not likely to be 100% correct. It is in fact a new category of bruised information.

What should we call it? I guess it is botinformation, or botinfo, with botfo as a possible shortest form. Although I may be putting this forward with a smile, it remains a serious concern to distinguish statistically generated prose from the human product, especially when the truth or 100% accuracy is of critical importance.

When you are gathering ideas or brainstorming, when you are editing, outlining or summarizing, the level of accuracy or bias may not be greatly significant. But when you get a report or diagnosis of your health, you need to know if it was entirely written by Dr X or if it is just botfo.

Politicians are widely assumed to be speaking worse than botfo most of the time, but the findings and proposals of structural engineers, everybody in the medical faculty, and the people who are going to get us out of the climate crisis, should never be replaced by botfo. It shouldn’t be difficult to find many more places where we need assurance that we are getting clean, clear information rather than the murky output of a machine. You can love chatbots, but you can only trust them so far.

The Infodemiot Index

Based loosely on John Baez’s “Crackpot Index” (https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html), which was designed for the physics community, this is aimed at the world of public health and the associated infodemics. It aims to be a light-hearted approach to assessing the extent of mis- and disinformation in a given health-related text, and the extent to which the author might be an “infodemiot”.

The Infodemiot Index

A simple method for rating challenging contributions to infodemiology

INSTRUCTIONS: Start from –5 (minus five) points. For a given text, add points for each infraction from the list below. Positive values indicate the degree to which the author of the text is an infodemiot.

1 point for every statement that is clearly inane, devoid of meaning, or logically inconsistent

2 points for every statement that evidence shows is wrong/erroneous (misinformation)

3 points for each keyword that is underlined, italicised or written in capital letters

4 points for each mention of “Fauchi”, “Center for Disease Research”, “John Hopkins University”,  or “World Hygiene Organization (WHO)”

5 points for each wrong/erroneous statement that is repeated despite having been carefully corrected (repeated misinformation)

10 points for each statement that is knowingly untrue (disinformation)

15 points for each knowingly untrue statement that is repeated despite rebuttal (repeated disinformation)

15 points for using a fictional analogy or metaphor to contradict a widely accepted set of real evidence

15 points for authors flaunting their education to demonstrate their sanity and infallibility

15 points for each new term invented and used without being properly defined

15 points for arguing that current well-established evidence is “only preliminary”, or “requires further research”, as if to suggest it was open to question and would probably later be proved wrong

15 points for arguing that, although evidence exists that a particular medical procedure may be effective, it doesn’t address root causes and disguises rarely documented but dangerous side-effects

20 points for false statements that are intended to hurt or damage a person or institution (malinformation)

20 points for emailing me and complaining about the Infodemiot Index (e.g., saying that it “provides a convenient smoke screen”, “ridicules free thinkers”, “is a tool of the scientific establishment”, or that I misspelled “Fauci”, etc., in item 4)

20 points for every reference to the plots of movies, games or fiction as if they were factually correct and entirely suitable as scientific evidence

20 points for each pairing of the author with a medical saint like Florence Nightingale or Albert Schweitzer

20 points for each claim that modern medicine has veered off its formerly rational path (without good evidence)

30 points for making radical and innovative comments about epidemiology, pharmacology, and other aspects of public health, although the author has no formal qualifications in any of these fields

30 points for medical facts referenced to alien or extraterrestrial sources, or derived from a close reading of the Tarot, I Ching or Tibetan Book of the Dead

30 points for each citation of discredited, disavowed or retracted research to contest good practices (as supported by a strong body of current evidence) or to advocate for bad health practices

30 points for each reference to a politician, film star, musician or sports person as an authoritative dispenser of advice about health or pharmaceuticals (other than illicit substances)

40 points for comparing those who disagree with the author to Nazis, Antifa, reptiles, paedophiles, etc.

40 points for noting that “the Deep State” is plotting to prevent this evidence from being applied

40 points for claiming that when this evidence is finally properly assessed, the author will be acclaimed a genius and the rest of medical research will be recognized as completely bogus and nothing more than fake news (30 more points for any wishful thinking about the punishment and humiliation facing any- and everyone who ever dared to disagree with the author)

© 2021 Chris Zielinski ziggytheblue.removethis@gmail.com

Open Access in sub-Saharan Africa

Introduction

RealKM Magazine recently carried a series on current thinking on Open Access, based on the book Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access¹. The following comments focus on Thomas Nkoudou’s chapter² on “Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon”. I will also react to a comment about the viability of Open Access books.

Open access, African researchers, and African literature

There are three clear questions practically related to OA in sub-Saharan Africa:

1. Does it help in providing access to African literature for both Africans and non-Africans?
2. Does it improve access to non-African literature for Africans?
3. Does it help Africans to get their research published?

And of course there are the broader social questions regarding coloniality and epistemic alienation.

OA and access to African literature

Regarding the first, this is the “coloniality” issue. My short 1995 editorial³ in the British Medical Journal argues for including literature from all countries in indexes like Scopus, Web of Science and MEDLINE. Nkoudou states that African research literature is ignored in the indexes. This was certainly extremely true 20 years ago (as my 1995 editorial attests), but is less true now. As we know, this situation has changed rapidly in the last twenty years, as the internet vacuums up every scrap of content available. One by one, all the journals of the world are being digitized, including those published in Africa.

Ultimately, though, this is a problem of scientific communication and the publishing industry. If an African journal is missing from an index, this has nothing to do with open access, which certainly doesn’t produce a negative impact. In fact, since open access focuses on digital versions of journals, going OA can help a journal to get accepted into an index.

As it happens, I have some unhappy personal experience in this area. I set up a project called ExtraMED back in the 1990s because I believed that there was value in medical literature from “the South” which was excluded from the narrow collection of journals adopted by the MEDLINE index. I made extensive agreements with some 200 journals from Africa, Asia and the Americas to include the full text on monthly CD-ROMs. We tried to cover costs (and collect revenue for the journals) from sales to libraries, but the world wasn’t ready for it, and it nearly bankrupted me. The real positive was that ExtraMED contributed to forcing the doors of MEDLINE open to many more journals from the global South in subsequent years. Much later, when I was Secretary General of the UK Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, I started a campaign to get academic writers to push for OA.

OA and access by Africans to non-African literature

This is around the question Nkoudou calls “epistemic alienation” (“the distortion of one’s native way of thinking, and of seeing and speaking of one’s own reality”). I fully agree that this is a key issue in the decolonisation of knowledge. However, this is surely a consequence of a much broader phenomenon – the impact of exterior cultures on indigenous ones, the impact of the whole of contemporary scientific communication and the internet.

Nkoudou says, “this dependence profoundly affects the African researcher’s way of thinking. And current OA policies are not helping to change this situation, because many of them are international and shaped for Western contexts.” That’s true, but the complaint that OA is “not helping” isn’t exactly scathing criticism.

The main impact of OA is that it has undoubtedly provided Africans with far greater access to non-African literature than ever before. Is that really a bad thing? Surely it has to be up to the reader to carry out the cultural appropriation – the good old caveat emptor – let the buyer beware? Africans (and non-Africans) are also getting access to much more African literature as a result, as well.

Imagine if it was the other way round – that OA provided less access to this literature. Perhaps, epistemically, this would be good in some fields, but certainly not in the  health sector, as things currently stand. African information specialists and researchers would undoubtedly be the first to protest if OA was to be withdrawn.

OA and publication by Africans in journals published outside Africa

The main obstacle posed by OA noted in Nkoudou’s chapter is the article processing charge (APC). He says APCs “have gained importance as the dominant and most prominent, even if not the most widespread, business model for open-access journals.” That little clause hidden in the middle of this sentence is worth considering: APCs may be the dominant element in the discourse, but they are certainly not the “most widespread” business model. About 36% of journals are OA, and only 39% of OA journals require the payment of an APC. So when we are complaining about APCs, we are complaining about the practices of about 14% of all journals.

In any case, publishers usually waive charges for researchers from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). I can’t remember ever hearing that a paper submitted  by an African researcher and recommended by peer review was rejected by a respectable APC-funded OA journal because the author or author’s institution refused to pay the APC. The APC is simply not a real barrier for African researchers writing papers good enough to be published. (On the other hand, it is a barrier for people like me, teaching at a UK university but without research funding – and as we know it is next to impossible to get research funding for knowledge management).

Having said that, I completely acknowledge, as did the UK government report  developed by INASP⁴ that, “Fee waivers can only ever be a short-term solution for LMICs, acting as a temporary fix to enable LMIC researchers to access Northern driven publishing systems, which do not work for LMIC research economies.” Incidentally, this precise issue is my main concern in my current (unpaid) advisory role with the US Copyright Clearance Centre.

The journals that are most likely to refuse a paper for non-payment of the APC are the so-called “predatory journals”, which will publish almost anything if you pay them. Predatory journals only exist to milk APCs from innocent academics, and are not respected or accepted by any academic community.

Open Access books

Like most readers and most writers, I am all for OA books. Springer Nature surveyed⁵ 2,500 academic book authors about OA for books, and they came up with the following main findings:

• Most book authors support the idea that all future scholarly books should be open access
• Pro-open access attitudes are stronger among junior researchers, researchers based in Europe and Asia, and previous open access book authors
• Ethical reasons (equality in access), and reaching a larger audience are identified as key motivations for choosing open access for books
• Lack of awareness, concerns about quality, and lack of funding are barriers to OA publication
• The majority of book authors want more financial support from funders for open access book publication
• Gold open access is the most preferred policy for open access books
• Reputation of publishers matters less to open access book authors but is still the deciding factor for publication.

As we all know, the “death of the book” has been announced repeatedly throughout the last century – and with increasing stridency since the birth of the internet. Aided or obliterated by other information sources that speak louder, or are just more fun, than rustling pages, we may indeed be closing in on that singularity now.

I’m a member of the London School of Economics Book Club, which asked its members to say ” How many books do you want to read in 2022?“. Out of 36 LSE Book Club members (and therefore all presumably avid readers), 18 (exactly 50%) ventured that they would like to read “one book a month”, or 12 a year. Worrying! Vladimir Nabokov claimed to have read 1,000 books during his four years in Cambridge: 250 a year. That’s about a book each day of term time. Perhaps reading two or three short ones on some days, and then spending a few days on the 500-page monsters.

It is beginning to look as though in future nobody will read anything longer than about 10 pages: the rise of the soundbite will interesect with the decline of the magnum opus (how’s that for a soundbite?).

So, while I am definitely in favour of OA books., as the above findings show, the most-touted (and really the only feasible) method of providing these is Gold OA – in other words, the dreaded APC. Essentially what this means is that the book has to be subsidised by an individual or institution. How to avoid that this process (and the content) is “Western-centric” beats me. I would welcome ideas on this and the other issues raised regarding open access for Africa.

References:

1. Eve, M. P., & Gray, J. (Eds.) (2020). Reassembling scholarly communications: Histories, infrastructures, and global politics of Open Access. MIT Press.
2. Nkoudou, T.H.M. (2020). Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon. In Eve, M. P., & Gray, J. (Eds.) Reassembling scholarly communications: Histories, infrastructures, and global politics of Open Access. MIT Press.
3. Zielinski, C. (1995). New equities of information in an electronic age. BMJ, 310(6993), 1480-1481.
4. Harle, J., & Warne, V. (2020). Open Access: challenges and opportunities for Low-and Middle-Income Countries and the potential impact of UK policy. Report of a consultation commissioned by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in collaboration with National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation.
5. Pyne, R., Emery, C., Lucraft, M., & Pinck, A. S. (2019). The future of open access books: findings from a global survey of academic book authors. Springer Nature White Paper.

Halfdan Mahler and the History of Health Development: A Personal Vignette

In 1982, on my first day as a newly appointed Reports Officer at the WHO Regional Office in New Delhi, I learned that there would be an extraordinary meeting of all staff that afternoon to hear a speech by WHO’s Director General, Dr Halfdan Mahler. Mahler was a Danish TB specialist. The son of a famous preacher, he had evidently inherited the gift of eloquence. He would need it: he was visiting India to promote WHO’S new objective, “Health for All by the year 2000”. How that could be achieved in a scant 18 years needed some explanation. To me, it seemed an impossible task.

I was told that my job at that day’s staff meeting would be to write up the visit for our staff paper. Duly armed with pencil and pad, I got into the elevator for the ride to the top floor. There was someone already in the lift. As the doors closed, I found – to my horror – the tall figure of Dr Mahler beaming down at me.

“Hello,” he said, nodding affably. A deep, musical voice.

“Hello, sir.” Mine came out as a squeak. We both laughed. In an attempt to salvage some dignity, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind: “Do you really think we will have health for all by the year 2000?”

“No,” he said with a smile. “But we will have fun trying.”

What Halfdan Mahler offered that afternoon in WHO’s New Delhi conference room was a perspective of health development leading up to the framework abbreviated as HFA/2000. He spoke about a history of changing development attitudes that can be traced from “the happy glory of the missionary days in the 1950s”, when a supranational spirit obscured the need to leave something behind and promote self-reliance. You could hear the preacher’s son in that. Colonial empires were crumbling rapidly and a whole tier of colonial administrators moved out of national service and into the offices of the United Nations system. Multilateralism was born.

In what he called the “integration sixties”, people were not so motivated. The emphasis shifted to technical virtues. “Experts” engaged in “pilot projects”, building up basic services and integrating all efforts into them. The problem with these experts was that they were experts at home, but not necessarily so when they got to what was called “the field” – the countries that allowed them to operate within their boundaries. Confronted by snags and difficulties unknown at home, the pilot projects they left in the field often collapsed when funding stopped, sometimes after many years of being propped up from abroad and numerous visits by further baffled experts. The fact that these men (rarely women) did most of their head-scratching in five-star hotels did not go unnoticed either.

The 70s continued the trend. Nevertheless, there was a palpable shift from the previous decade towards recognition that local knowledge could not be ignored in development. To an extent, this reflected changes in the wider social environment in the industrialised countries, where a wave of long hair and liberal thinking was busily dissolving many of the rigid concepts of the past. It became essential to integrate local knowledge into all development projects. In some cases, however, this laudable shift went too far. Development staff from the multilateral organizations so deeply submerged their own external knowledge and experience, and let local knowledge and opinion rule, that they made no impact at all. Being humble was not enough: while it was good to sit at the feet of the villagers to learn, there wasn’t much point in foreigners turning up if they brought no new ideas to the table. Towards the end of the 1970s, development actors began searching for a unifying concept for their entire effort.

The 1980s, which Mahler termed “the implementation 80s”, became a time of policy implementation, as “Health for All by the Year 2000” began its journey. It became the first decade with a clear overarching policy framework for health development, and it was the first such holistic effort across a any sector.

Until then, WHO staff responsible for health programmes had followed paths laid down by donors, politicians and blind luck. Malaria had one such financial and political environment, diabetes another, Buruli Ulcer a third – and so on, for hundreds of conditions, each programme canyon completely unrelated to the others.  

Mahler made WHO turn the HFA idea into a full-scale programme framework. All of WHO’s institutional components became locked into the framework, as set out in a “rainbow series” of policy documents (the cover of each policy booklet in a different colour). All activities undertaken by the Organization, however small, had to be coherent with the overall strategy. For staff, having to justify the purchase of a computer by explaining how the purchase would help to achieve health for all people by the year 2000 was a strange and sometimes unwelcome experience. The client countries had to get used to this new way of thinking too, in their regular negotiations over how to deploy WHO funds and activities.

Of course, WHO’s organizational canyons have not disappeared. They are still there, as each programme confronts its separate administrative, technical and financial world. What has changed, however, is that – starting from HFA/2000 – they have become united as clear and explicit parts of an overall development strategy. It is the framework that was the success. This was the historic innovation Mahler gave the development world. WHO set up goals and targets, created timetables for national and regional action, all signed and agreed by every country. And it is a durable achievement.

When we didn’t achieve health for all by the year 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan picked up the baton and proposed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in his Millennium Declaration speech. Following the same kind of framework as WHO used for the health goals, the UN proposed to solve all the world’s development problems by the year 2015. The eight MDGs, their subsidiary targets and indicators, became the overriding obsession of the development world in every multilateral agency and national ministry between 2000 and 2015.

As with HFA/2000, the MDGs were not fully achieved, and so everyone agreed to a new set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aimed at finishing the job by 2030. The growth in the numbers of goals and targets implied a boom in the indicators used to measure progress. However, whereas the UN set most of the goals and targets for the MDGs, national, non-UN system actors developed most of the targets and indicators for the SDGs.

Will the SDGs be attained by 2030? To use a hated expression, “Whatever”. It is not the repeated failure to reach the promised land that is worthy of comment, but rather the success in encapsulating the entire development ambition in a growing, but still slender list of goals and targets. It would not be surprising if a new formulation of the goals appeared well before the end of the present decade. However often we push the goalposts back, we can be grateful for a robust, interrelated set of targets to guide us. The road may be long, but at least it is there, with signposts and speed limits, and we are on the way.

In conclusion, let’s return to Halfdan Mahler speaking to a rapt audience of WHO staff in the WHO Conference room in New Delhi in 1982. For the previous 30 minutes he had amused, entertained, and carried us along with his eloquence and passion, and now he concluded his speech by describing what he took to be the right approach to development work:

Aggressive humility is needed. Rather than missionary sympathy, what we need is empathy – the ability to see through national eyes. Motivation is essential; technical competence is not enough – the competence must be socially attuned. There has never been progress through pure technocratic solutions – there must be a huge swell of emotional energy behind these technocratic solutions if they are going to be translated into something beneficial for people and peoples.

This statement of values should be nailed to the walls of everybody working in this area.

As I write this, 40 years later, I wonder what I was thinking in that elevator. How could I, a lowly regional reports officer, have had the nerve to fire such a conversational torpedo at the Director-General’s main strategic ambition within five seconds of meeting him? If Mahler hadn’t been such a confident leader, he would have fired me on the spot. His answer to my fumbled question about the virtues of development is another worthy statement of values: “We will have fun trying”.

Dr Halfdan Mahler

Unbenign Neglect: Dealing with neglected tropical diseases

Côte d’Ivoire, July 1997. A convoy of deluxe 4x4s emerges from the cocoa and cashew trees and pulls into a village. The Land Cruisers stop at the only brick building: the health centre. The waiting villagers breathe in the dust and look on.

 A door opens. Out steps the country’s Minister of Health, followed shortly by his honourable Japanese guest. The two men greet the villagers, who mutter a ragged response. As custom dictates, the Minister asks about their families, their crops, their well-being. Everyone is fine, just fine. But one of them appears to be missing chunks of his face. His foot, too, is missing a large patch of skin – the red lines of knotted muscle show plainly when he moves.

The Japanese visitor turns to the Minister and speaks softly so the villagers can’t hear. “What’s that?” He nods towards the disfigured man.

“An infection.” says his host. “It eats your flesh.”

“An infection?” says the Japanese. “You know, I saw something like that back home.”

They tour the health centre, chat amiably with the patients and nurses (there is no doctor), and eventually return to their 4x4s. Switching on the aircons, they blast down the dusty roads back to the capital.

 

Starting to end neglect

And there the story would have ended, and the neglected tropical disease would have continued to be neglected. Except that the visitor was Dr Hiroshi Nakajima, Director-General of the World Health Organization. This chance encounter in Cote d’Ivoire stuck in the DG’s head and, when he returned to Geneva, he set up a tiny team – Dr Kingsley Asiedu from Ghana, and an assistant – initially with almost a zero budget, to investigate what he learned was called the Buruli ulcer, after the place in Uganda where it was first noticed.

Nakajima lobbied in his home country and got the Nippon Foundation to fund a new global partnership: the Global Buruli Ulcer Initiative. Work started in earnest.

As luck would have it, I met Dr Asiedu shortly thereafter. I was on a consultancy mission to find out more about WHO’s global partnerships. On a hot summer’s day, I walked along the endless corridors to a remote part of the huge WHO building. Previously I had seen the big, well-staffed, multi-million dollar partnerships – Roll Back Malaria, Stop TB – and this was going to be my first taste of a small one.

 

We don’t know anything!

I didn’t realize how small. Kingsley Asiedu, a tall, well-built Ghanaian, was at his uncluttered desk. The blinds were drawn against the heat. An old air conditioner stuttered behind him, and he mentioned that his assistant was away. He was alone, and I had the sudden thought that he might really be alone – the one person in the world who was tackling the mysteries of the Buruli ulcer. It wasn’t true, of course, as there were a few other Buruli researchers scattered around the globe. But still.

“We don’t know anything about it, really,” he said. He seemed tired – matter-of-fact, but not unconcerned. There was a quiet resolve, perhaps passion. “We have no facts – we don’t know how many people have it, what causes it. Actually, we don’t know anything.”

“So how do they treat it. Is there a cure?”

“Nope, no cure. Only surgery.”

“What, they just cut out the infected bits?”

“Yeah. It usually leaves people looking like monsters, but what can you do?”

I looked at the large, empty office, with its few scattered books and manuals, a few papers stuffed into the shelves. As the aircon flapped ineffectively in the shaded room , a feeling of hopelessness swept over me. How could one person do anything? And how odd that the barbarous horror of a flesh-eating disease was being pursued in the heart of genteel Geneva.

 

Small individual causes with big collective effects

Buruli ulcer is the classic neglected tropical disease, or NTD – one of many NTDs which affect too few people for anyone to want to do much about them. Drug companies don’t consider it worth investing research money, so medicines don’t get produced. Overburdened health systems in affected countries focus their scant resources on the major health problems, not the minor ones. And politicians inevitably address their priorities – and budgets – only on conditions affecting their biggest voting blocs.

However, while each of them only affect small populations, collectively NTDs occur in 149 countries and affect a billion people, costing developing economies billions of dollars every year. They mainly affect populations living in poverty, without adequate sanitation and in close contact with infectious vectors and domestic animals and livestock.

So when Nakajima decided not to neglect the Buruli ulcer, he was doing something quite unusual. In the 1998 conference launching the Global Buruli Ulcer Initiative, he said,

I decided to place emphasis on the fight against Buruli ulcer for the following reasons. In the 21st century, where infectious diseases are concerned, the world will have to find the means both to control major long-standing scourges such as tuberculosis and malaria, and also to deal effectively with emerging diseases such as Buruli ulcer. I am convinced that these two different sorts of challenges will have to be tackled simultaneously. If we fail to do so, the prevalence of infectious diseases as a whole is likely to increase worldwide, and the severity of specific diseases may well increase too.

This is still a good summary of why we should care about neglected tropical diseases.

To bring the Buruli story up to date, here is what we now know: Buruli ulcer is caused by the Mycobacterium ulcerans bacterium. It exists in at least 33 countries around the world. In 2014, 2200 new cases were reported. It mostly affects children. The good news is that 80% of cases detected early can be cured with a combination of antibiotics, rather than surgery.

The Global Buruli Ulcer Initiative has drawn together global expertise and led mobilization of needed resources. More than 40 nongovernmental organizations, research institutions, and foundations are now participating in the Initiative.  Nonetheless, Buruli ulcer remains a neglected disease and much work, at all levels, needs to be done to improve prospects for control.

Is Access to Information a Human Right?

Do we have the right to access information that is essential to human development? Isn’t it a human right? The short answer is no, although quite a few people think it is. Meanwhile, copyright has a basis in human rights – although nobody thinks so.

There are two levels at which the access to information is addressed by legal frameworks. At the visionary end, there are various international declarations of human rights, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) at the summit (together with its implementing instruments such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights). These declarations have no direct statutory effect, but nevertheless they have a powerful rhetorical and moral impact, and influence the framing of legislation. At the more practical end is a thicket of international and national legislation seeking to convert the ethical and moral conclusions of these declarations into action or (more usually) into barriers to action, following the format of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not…”.

In this posting, I will take a look at the first level of information rights and consider the question: Does the UDHR and its associated covenants grant a right of access to information essential to human development?

Being a robust and legally well-drafted document, the UDHR is admirably ambiguous, ambivalent and even-handed. Little is explicit, lots is implicit: lawyers purr at its loopholes. Here is a gentle examination of the clauses related to an access right (the original text is given in italics, and my comments are given in normal type):

Article 18: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

The freedoms of thought, conscience and religion are all what I would call “internal rights”, in the sense that they apply to what is going on within a person. Nobody can prevent someone merely thinking freely, having a conscience or believing in a religion. These rights can all be exercised in perfect safety by a silent, uncommunicative human being, without breathing a word about it to anyone.

In this article, the internal rights are complemented by the external right to “manifest” your religion – essentially to speak and write about it.

The freedom to think is not the same as the freedom to access the expression of other people’s thoughts, as manifested in books, films or music. This may be implicit, but this article does not explicitly offer the right to such access.

Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

This article is often taken to assert an access right, but does it? I think not. Let us take the text to pieces slowly and carefully:

As with Article 18, the right to “freedom of opinion and expression” comprises an internal and external component: “opinion” and “expression”.

• The first of these, the right (or “freedom”) “to hold opinions without interference” is similar to the internal rights in Article 18: nobody can prevent someone merely holding an opinion. It is only when you express your opinions that you can run into trouble.
• So what about the external right of “expression”? The first thing to observe is that, as written, Article 19 surely asserts this right only in relation to opinions. If this interpretation is correct, the “information and ideas” it mentions are restricted to the means by which you express your opinions and learn about the opinions of others.
• Does this include a right to collect information and ideas about non-opinions – things like scientific and other knowledge, for example? It could be argued that the scientific method is actually the expression of opinions about the nature of things. According to Karl Popper, scientific progress involves the falsification of existing, well-formulated, falsifiable theories, which, in the light of new evidence, are superseded by new falsifiable theories. In that case, scientific theory looks very much like a set of opinions with which one can disagree by adducing new facts. However, even if scientific theory can be made to fit this article as “opinion”, the key applications of science and what we call “the evidence base” of essential information – these are surely not “opinion”. and if they are not opinion, then Article 19 does not assert a right to access such essential information.
• The main practical use of Article 19 by campaigning organizations such as the aptly named Article 19 has been in combating censorship. With a focus on the freedom of expression part of this right, the Article19 website states that “freedom of expression is key to the development, dignity and fulfilment of every person”, and provides examples of how States benefit from the freedom of expression: each of the examples turns on political debate and governance; opinion, thus, rather than fact. What they call the “development, dignity and fulfilment of every person” is the development of our ability to speak for ourselves in the battle of opinion.

In conclusion of this mini-analysis of Article 19, the “information and ideas” to which we have an access right are generally held to be expressions of political and other current social opinion – the sort of thing you find in newspapers – and not, for example, practical information related to human development – as contained in journals, books and manuals.

This distinction is important. Article 19 focuses on expressing (seeking, receiving and imparting) political opinions. The kind of educational access to information essential to human development fits more within the ambit of Article 26 – in fact, the very existence of Article 26 is an indication that the UDHR framers did not consider that education was covered by Article 19. This is also true of Article 27 regarding culture and authorship. So let’s take a quick look at these two articles:

Article 26: 1. Everyone has the right to education… Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. 2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms…

While Article 26 offers a right to education, it does not mention the fundamental tools for education – knowledge in a written or other fixed form. You obviously need to access information and other educational materials if you are going to have an education, so this may be considered to be implicit, although it is not stated. The UDHR explicitly mandates the teachers and classrooms, but not the books.

Article 27: 1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Again, the right to participate in “cultural life” and to “share in scientific advancement” in the first clause seems to be conferring an implicit access right: how can you experience culture without access to such cultural products as books and films and music, and how can you share in scientific advancement without reading about it? And yet this is again not stated.

It begins to be clear in the second clause of this Article, which may be surprising to many. This clause confers a “right of protection” of the “moral and material interests” of authors. Rather than giving people the right to read, it gives authors the right to prevent people from reading.

Does this imply that copyright is a human right? Not according to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a body of independent experts reporting to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose commentary on the UDHR and Covenant is taken as holy writ. In their Comment 17, they explain that copyright is not a human right because human rights go deeper. attach to a human (rather than a publishing company or producer), and last a lifetime.

But if copyright is not a human right, the second part of Article 27 of UDHR surely provides its ethical basis. And it places the right to control the work firmly in the hands of the author. This is why access to information is not a human right: If authors/creators have a human right to control their output, which allows them to decide all significant further uses (publishing, reading, playing, etc) of their work, then nobody else does.

Of course authors want to be read, musicians to be heard, and so they are not usually the main barrier to access. But to be read or heard, they have to descend from the cloud of human rights into the marketplace of copyright. They have to sell, license or barter their rights to publishers, producers and others in the media chain, who end up being the main “rightsholders” benefiting from copyright legislation rooted in Article 27(2). From a human rights standpoint, thus, this clause sanctions the entire copyright edifice of modern publishing, music and film. Once this lobbyists’ fingerprint is visible, it ceases to be a surprise that you don’t find an access right to information in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Personally, I am in favour of authors retaining the rights to their work – both as copyright and in their “moral rights”, the full European droits d’auteur. But I am also in favour of the needy populations of the world having unconditional access to information essential for human development. How to reconcile these positions will be the subject of my next few blogs.

References/Acknowledgements

The Article19 website is at http://www.article19.org

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: General Comment 17 can be found at http://www.refworld.org/docid/441543594.html  Thanks to Mark Perkins for drawing my attention to this.

An excellent recent book on international copyright is Blomqvist, Jorgen, Primer on International Copyright and Related Rights, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, Cheltenham, UK, 2014

Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1959.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

An Information Gap in Human Rights

Tags

Copyright, Essential information, Knowledge, Rights

I’m going to review an old bit of copyright law and try to make it sing. More, I’m going to try and convince you it is important, and even something in which it is worth your investing a little passion. Finally, I hope you will agree it might be worth reviving in some form or other.

What is it?

Let’s start with the Berne Convention, which is still the principal document setting out just what copyright is and what it covers – including any exceptions, exclusions and limitations…Berne was launched in 1886 and first “completed” in 1896, and has been revised several times since. Altogether 168 countries have signed it – including the USA, which finally inked its accession in 1988, after nearly a century of resistance.

The “old bit of copyright” that fascinates and depresses me is a forgotten right buried in a lowly Appendix. This Appendix was added to the Berne Convention in 1971 when it was last revised in Paris; the whole instrument is known as the Paris Revisions, or Paris Act.

Why it is fascinating and depressing?

The Appendix is fascinating, since it is the only text in the Act that specifically addresses the information needs of developing countries (reproduced in the Universal Copyright Convention).

And depressing, since – despite having been successfully enacted in the teeth of fierce opposition from publishers, and despite allowing developing countries the right to re-publish copyright materials whether the publishers allow it or not, under a compulsory license – it seems that little use has ever been made of it by any developing country.

And yet again, fascinating, because it provides an approach to defining information that is considered important – or even essential – to human development: “Ah yes, but who can say what is essential?” you might ask. Well the Paris Act provides a broad description that has survived the scrutiny of hordes of repudiating publishers and arrays of lawyers, many of them paid to be bite-your-ankle hostile. The definition must therefore be at least good enough (I will come back to the topic of essential information in a later blog).

And yet, it is depressing again because, as it stands, the text is limited to analogue material. The Appendix was somehow forgotten during the whole decade during which the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) worked on producing a digital extension for the Berne Convention, as enshrined in the WIPO Copyright Treaty. No digital extension was ever produced for the Appendix.

And thus – finally – fascinating, because if it was revived now, it could serve as a vehicle for raising developing country concerns relating to essential information in the digital age. This is what could make it compelling today.

A bit more detail

In six short Articles, the Appendix sets out the conditions under which developing countries can issue compulsory licences to translate and republish “for the purpose of teaching, scholarship or research” anything that has been published abroad – whether the foreign publisher wants to allow it or not. “Anything” is specified as “natural and physical sciences, including mathematics, and …technology [and] fiction, poetry, drama and music, and … art books.”

As I mentioned earlier, the Appendix doesn’t cover anything digital. However, what it does cover is admirably broad: “print and analogous forms of reproduction… works which are composed mainly of illustrations [and thus arguably photographs and graphic/art works]…broadcasts… [and] sound or visual recordings of a translation… [and] audio-visual fixation”.

So the Appendix covers the translation and republishing/rebroadcasting of all subjects, in virtually all non-digital media, as long as the purpose is non-commercial and educational.

Sounds good, but there are many conditions and hoops for the developing country to jump through – starting with having to declare that it can’t “make provision for the protection of all the rights as provided for” in the Berne Convention, because of its “economic situation and its social or cultural needs”. Unique in the copyright world, this amounts to a declaration of incompetence. So it is not surprising that countries are reluctant to sign on.

But there are more unwelcome oddities in this short text. You can only apply for a compulsory license after you have tried to get a license from the rightsholder and you have been refused it, or if you can’t find the rightsholder. This is very onerous for a developing country translator – prohibitively so. The foreign rightsholder actually has to refuse permission for the translation before you can start. A hint of paradox there.

Then, while developing country publishers are not allowed to publish and sell commercial editions, they are nevertheless obliged to pay “just compensation” to the foreign rightsholders. The Appendix even helpfully considers possible foreign exchange problems in this regard. This too seems a contradiction in terms: you may be producing information materials which you intend to give away – and you have to pay a foreign rightsholder for the pleasure?

As a former translator, it tickled me to note that the Appendix calls for “national legislation to ensure a correct translation” – surely a first. Has any country ever introduced legislation to make bad translations illegal? I wish they had it in the UK, as I would be extremely litigious! Very unlikely that any developing country would waste intellectual steam and resources on cooking up such an absurd law.

Finally, the Appendix descends into gobbledygook. I accept it may be my intellectual laziness that prevents me from understanding the last Article. I won’t quote it, but the title gives a hint of its obscurity: “Possibilities of applying, or admitting the application of, certain provisions of the Appendix before becoming bound by it”. I spent a suffering hour unsuccessfully trying to digest the 161 words in the first clause. I think it allows you to set up a compulsory licensing scheme by dickering with the Convention itself, rather than using the Appendix. But wouldn’t swear to that. In any case, the wording is one final unnecessary hurdle for developing countries wishing to translate and publish information essential to their citizens’ development.

A conclusion

To date, only 16 of the 168 Convention signatory countries have also signed up for the Appendix, and I have been unable to trace any actual application of its provisions. So here we have an instrument used by almost no country to do almost nothing. If the publishers’ lobby wanted it to fail, they have succeeded admirably.

But here’s a what-if: What if we did for the Appendix what WIPO has already done for the rest of the Convention? Bring it up to date for the digital age. Add the internet, CD-ROM/DVD, the whole glorious excesses of technology. Subtract deliberate confusion. Clarify and make usable. Promote actively.

This should be easier than the initial struggle for the analogue version. It wouldn’t cost the rightsholders anything – the most they would lose is markets where they earn nothing anyway. Rightsholders have learned from such initiatives as HINARI – which provides developing countries with free access to electronic versions of journals – and which are based on precisely this concept. Making copies of existing electronic versions costs publishers nothing, apart from a very small administrative overhead, while the enhancement of their public image, rosy feelings of self-worth, and (joking apart) future sales when the countries shed their “developing” tag – makes it all worthwhile.

An international copyright expert I discussed this with pointed out that you can’t just change the Appendix, you have to reopen discussion on the whole Berne Convention. And nobody wants to do that, neither publishers nor the developing countries.  Trying to tilt at that particular windmill, he said, would indeed be quixotic.

Well, it may be quixotic, Sancho Panza, but it is a key part of the discussion of an access right to information, which we will be exploring further in this blog. If the right of access to information essential for human development in the digital age cannot be discussed in the context of updating the Appendix to the Berne Convention, or as a component of an expanded WIPO Copyright Treaty, then how can it be tackled?

Because this is certainly a gap in our acknowledged human rights.

What do you think?

Dying Trying: The UN’s Development Agenda for the Next 15 Years

Tags

Data, Development, Health information, Knowledge

UN Secretary General Dr Ban Ki-moon today presented his synthesis report on the post-2015 Development Agenda. Entitled “The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet”, this is Ban Ki-moon’s updating of the Millennium Development report (which Kofi Annan rather more modestly called “We the Peoples – The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century).

I note in passing that the former penchant for having development “Decades” covering distinct topics has now swollen into a 15-year catch-all cycle. WHO’s Health for All, which all of us were supposed to be enjoying by the year 2000, was taken over by the UN and prolonged into 2015 in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This is now being extended to 2030 in a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) launched by the Secretary General’s report.

Well, health was not achieved by all by the year 2000; nor will all the MDGs be achieved by most countries by next year. With the 17 SDGs more than doubling the eight MDGs, one might conclude that the opportunities for failure are that much greater. While this may be true, in a literal sense, we should recognize that the real value of these efforts lies in providing a coherent structure for development work, and a rational way to measure and assess the results.

“Data” is the big word in Ban Ki-moon’s report. He proposes nothing less than a “data revolution to make information and data more available, more accessible, and more broadly disaggregated, as well as for measurable goals and targets, and a participatory mechanism to review implementation at the national, regional, and global levels.” Whether we succeed or fail, thus, at least we will be able to measure it.

The report presents an obligatory mantra of “Six Essential Elements for delivering the SDGs”, with health categorized under “People: to ensure healthy lives, knowledge, and the inclusion of women and children”. Here is the totality of what Ban Ki-moon says about health:

The agenda must address universal health-care coverage, access and affordability; end preventable maternal, new-born and child deaths and malnutrition; ensure the availability of essential medicines; realize women’s reproductive health and rights; ensure immunization coverage; eradicate malaria and realize the vision of a future free of AIDS and tuberculosis; reduce the burden of non-communicable diseases, including mental illness, nervous system injuries and road accidents; and promote healthy behaviours, including those related to water, sanitation and hygiene.

No surprises there, then.

It is a little disappointing that the “knowledge” part of the Essential Element on People focuses only on asserting a right to education for children and adolescents. However, the implication that knowledge is essential for development appears under various guises throughout the report. For example, Ban Ki-moon calls upon Member States to scale up cooperation for the sharing of technologies, strengthening knowledge and capacity building, and to make the necessary policy adjustments to facilitate these actions. He stresses that such technologies and knowledge should be transferred to developing countries on favourable, concessional, and preferential terms. Moreover, he says, the global intellectual property regimes and the application of TRIPS flexibilities should support sustainable development.

Ban Ki-moon proposes to establish an online, global platform to map existing technology facilitation initiatives, needs and gaps (including in health), enhance international cooperation and coordination , and promote networking, information sharing, knowledge transfer, and technical assistance. Roll on the UN Observatory…

Clearly the report offers plenty of work, which will require a myriad of hands and a mountain of money. We know perfectly well that by 2030 we will not have achieved dignity for everyone, much less ended poverty, transformed all lives and protected the planet. Still, we will have made another start, and there will be plenty of data to scrutinize when the next report is launched in December 2029.

Looking ahead, since we need more superlatives and might as well follow the expansive trend by moving to a 20-year cycle, I propose that the next report be called something like “Universal Nirvana by 2050”, and that it should be positively stuffed with UN-DGs. We won’t reach those either, but we will certainly die trying.

Ebola and Power

Tags

Ebola, Health information, Knowledge management

One evening last year in Brazzaville, Congo, as we were playing a lazy game of tennis outdoors under the floodlights, I heard a swishing sound. Little bats used to flit down and sometimes collide with our tennis balls, so I assumed we were in for a bat attack. We were: but, instead of little birdlike pipistrelle, two fruit bats as big as dogs, with wings a metre wide, swept down over the courts. They looked like nothing on earth – feathered chests, bulging eyeballs, fangs… We dived to the ground – all of us, foreigners and Congolese – as they passed low over our heads. We stayed down, expecting another attack, but the bats never came back.

LIKE THOSE HORRORS, ALL OUR WORST FEARS SEEM to come from the steamy tropical jungles of Central Africa. However, it is important to understand which are the rational fears, and which are the wild fantasies, the nightmares.

Around 1900, in a remote part of southeastern Cameroon, a porter for a colonial company picked up the HIV virus from an infected chimpanzee – probably by eating it (about 2 million Africans eat such “bushmeat”). HIV/AIDS spread down the Congo River to Leopoldville (now called Kinshasa). According to the genetic record, all the HIV in the world seems to have come from a single piece of genetic material that existed in Leopoldville at the beginning of the 20th century. Africans spread it in Africa, but it took a Western missionary to spread it to the wider world.

In 1976, near the Ebola River in northern Congo, not far from the source of HIV/AIDS, a new filovirus was first detected in a mission hospital run by Flemish nuns. The first victim was Mabalo Lokela, a 44-year-old schoolteacher. As with HIV, scientists first believed that the source of Ebola was bushmeat, but since monkeys also died from the disease, they could not be its reservoir. Working their way through candidate species, researchers found that fruit bats carried Ebola without dying. This makes them the likely reservoir, transmitting the virus by biting monkeys, apes, armadillos, porcupines – and occasionally humans.

HOWEVER COMPELLING AND FASCINATING THESE EXOTIC ORIGINS MAY BE, the way the diseases spread – and particularly the way the information about the diseases spread – tells us something about colonialism and power.

HIV/AIDS certainly circulated in a low-key way throughout tropical Africa for decades without exploding. Up until the 1950s, it is estimated that only 1% of the adults in major African population centres had AIDS. One likely reason was the predominance of circumcision among African men (circumcised males are 70% less likely to transmit HIV). Poverty is another factor. “Wealthier people — doctors, teachers, politicians, singers — get HIV in completely disastrous numbers. Some of that has to do with access to resources and multiple sexual partners.”[1]

Colonialism undoubtedly helped AIDS spread in Africa – it can be traced coming down the rivers in colonial vessels, along porter paths and colonial trading posts and railroad lines.

With Ebola, the situation was different. Unlike HIV/AIDS, which only really exploded publicly among the gay population of the United States in the 1980s, we knew right away that Ebola was coming from Africa. Although the initial outbreaks were generally shut down as soon as they were observed, Ebola quickly became demonized as a particularly horrible, disgusting, mysterious, EVIL killer.

EBOLA IS CERTAINLY HORRIBLE ENOUGH – YOU GET IT THROUGH contact with the body fluids of the dying and dead – and days or weeks after they have died. What you experience is not nice: high fever, severe headache, muscle, joint, or abdominal pain, severe weakness, exhaustion, sore throat, nausea, dizziness, internal and external bleeding, diarrhoea, dark or bloody faeces, vomiting blood, red eyes, rash, low blood pressure, rapid heartbeat, damage to the kidneys, spleen, and liver, internal and external haemorrhage from orifices such as the nose and mouth… According to the books, “Eventually, Ebola will turn the host’s organs to a mush-like substance.”[2] It takes about three weeks, and up to 90% die. There’s no standard treatment for it, either.

The thing is, as long as you segregate the remains of those who have died of it from the population, you can contain it. This has been the result to date. Typically ten or twenty people die in an outbreak, a tragedy for the individuals, of course, but far from enough to be considered a major public health issue. To get some perspective, at the time of writing, there have been over 15,000 cases of Ebola in the last 20 weeks, resulting so far in about 5,500 deaths. In the same period, some 200,000 children have died from malaria in Africa. Annually, between 250,000 and 500,000 people in the world die from influenza. By these yardsticks, Ebola should be almost invisible as a public health problem. To some, the fact that Ebola has become such a focus of attention is a consequence of “the pathology of the capitalist system”[3].

BUT THE THRILL OF SHOCKING AND HORRIFYING NEWS IS HARD TO RESIST. Richard Preston’s 1994 non-fiction book The Hot Zone was the first to raise the spectre of this African plague in Western consciousness. Subtitled “A Terrifying True Story”, the book didn’t try to resist the temptation to sensationalize the pants off the story. Preston makes the connection between infected animal remains he found in a cave in Uganda and a lab in Reston, Virginia, where a monkey virus similar to Ebola, but which does not affect humans, was discovered. The unmistakable insinuation was that we could expect mass transmission of this African horror to the West.

The book was a best-seller. Based on this, Outbreak, a high-budget Hollywood movie, was made in 1995 with an A-list of stars including Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Kevin Spacey and Donald Sutherland. The film spread the notion that Ebola could be transmitted through the air – in fact, it can’t. It was a box office and financial success, securing number 1 on its opening weekend. With a $50 million budget, it went on to gross some $190 million worldwide.[4]

Of course, treating “Darkest Africa” as the source of such exaggerated nightmares is both childish and demeaning to the continent. It may betray colonialist and racist attitudes – the fear of being tainted by the “Other” (to use Kapuscinski’s terminology), of being defiled by this vile, alien contagion. One African commentator[5] called this “whipping up anti-African hysteria.” “The media has racialized the Ebola pandemic”.

AMONG THOSE WHO NOTED THE RISE OF A NEW BIOLOGICAL NASTY were the Japanese terrorist group– Aum Shinrikyo, which carried out a bioterror campaign in 1995, dispersing the nerve agent sarin on the Tokyo underground and killing 13 people. Police investigating the cult found Ebola cultures at their headquarters, which members had picked up in Zaire the year before. Fortunately, Ebola cannot be spread this way.

Some commentators, noting that the US government carried out a biological and chemical weapon experimentation project called Project 112 from 1962 to 1973[6], wonder if the present outbreak has anything to do with such experimentation, although this seems most improbable for the same reasons that stopped Aum Shinrikyo – it is simply not so easy to collect, preserve and transmit.

TO CONCLUDE, IT IS WORTH NOTING THAT ALMOST ALL THE EBOLA AID for the three West African countries most affected in the present outbreak – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – is coming from the three former colonial masters, respectively, the USA, the UK and France, and that each is giving virtually nothing to either of the other two.

China is giving something to each of them, but then China wants something from all of them: “iron ore mining, energy and infrastructure“, according to Professor Sreeram Chaula[7], who develops the theme of “viral aid” in his recent paper. “If the US, UK and France were driven by humanitarian motives,” he asks, “Why did they not contribute to the multilateral UN Ebola response fund that would have distributed the funds more equitably among the three worst-hit West African countries? Thus far, only India and Australia have made sizeable donations of $10 million each to the UN Ebola fund that is woefully undersubscribed.”

The moral of the story is that we should be alert to the stereotypes we are handed by our so-called friends in the media, who want more readers; by our would-be educators in the entertainment industry, who want to sell more tickets and popcorn; by our wise or crafty leaders, who want to exercise their power in former colonies; and even by the impartial, evidence-based medical establishment, which knows which way the political and budgetary winds are blowing.

The giant fruit bats float through the humid forests of Africa as they have for thousands of years. From some genetic mutation they collect a poison virus in their veins. Wheeling in the dark, they dive out of the night to bite their natural prey, completely unaware of the chaos they are sowing among the human race. No doubt, there is more to come…

[1] Rob Waters. AIDS: Why Africa suffers for the West’s sins. Craig Timberg interview. Salon Magazine, 9/3/2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/03/09/aids_why_africa_suffers_for_the_west%E2%80%99s_sins/

[2] WHO advisory to travellers

[3] Ebola Epidemic Exposes the Pathology of the Capitalist System, Amit Sengupta, Newsclick, August 21, 2014, http://newsclick.in/international/ebola-epidemic-exposes-pathology-capitalist-system

[4] Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_%28film%29

[5] Horace G. Campbell. 2014. Ebola, the African Union and bioeconomic warfare. Pambazuka News 697, 2014-10-08 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/usaafricadialogue/kIOxB6Ve7bs

[6] Horace G. Campbell. 2014. Ebola, the African Union and bioeconomic warfare. Pambazuka News 697, 2014-10-08 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/usaafricadialogue/kIOxB6Ve7bs

[7] Sreeram Chaulia, 2014.Foreign pulse: Viral politics. Originally published in Asian Age. Oct 07, 2014. Available from  http://sreeramchaulia.net/publications/EbolaPolitics.htm