by Kwei Quartey

Ebola's Racial Disparity
Ebola's Racial Disparity




Martin Salia, a legal and permanent Maryland resident, was the medical director of Sierra Leone's Kissy United Methodist Hospital and its only full-time physician. As one of a shockingly small number of doctors in that country -- a mere 136 for a population of 6 million -- Salia was a rare breed of physician capable of treating anything from orthopedic injuries to myocardial infarction.

In Africa, physician scarcity often precludes the luxurious medical division of labor in the West. I once visited a mid-sized hospital in rural Ghana and foolishly asked the medical director how many other doctors shared his on-call schedule. "There aren't any other doctors here," he replied in bewilderment.



He began receiving convalescent serum in Sierra Leone, and five days elapsed before he was sent to an Ebola isolation center for treatment in the United States -- around a week later into the illness than his white American counterparts. It seems clear that delays in Salia's diagnosis and treatment resulted in his deterioration to a point beyond repair. By the time he arrived in the United States on November 15, his raging infection had already rendered him too ill to be saved.


The team of physicians from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the World Health Organization who took care of Khan reportedly "agonized through the night" over whether to administer ZMapp to him.In the end, without discussing it with Khan, they decided against it. "What they really didn't want to do was kill Dr. Khan with their attempt at therapy," Armand Sprecher, a public health specialist at MSF, reportedly said.

But surely the converse question should also have been posed: what if they cured Khan? Sprecher, who is involved in procuring drugs for MSF, further offered what from my perspective as a physician was the flimsiest of excuses: that Khan's virus levels were so high that it was believed the drug would "probably not work."

So which is it?



In the now infamous story of Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan -- who died in a Texas hospital after contracting Ebola in Africa -- Duncan's nephew Josephus Weeks has raised the possibility that racial bias entered into the decision to send the febrile man home from the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital emergency room on September 25. Similar broad ethical questions arise about whether the treatment of Ebola victims is being stratified on criteria of national origin, making some "more equal than others."


Kwei Quartey M.D. is a crime novelist and physician who grew up in Ghana. He is now based in Los Angeles.


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