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Baffour’s Beefs with Baffour Ankomah
SINCE my last column on Ebola was published last week, the debate on the current epidemic in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia has intensified, including some dirty work by Newsweek magazine to distract attention from the most likely cause or causes of the current outbreak. During the past week, a growing number of Africans has publicly expressed concern about the inadequacy of the official

explanations about the likely cause or causes of the epidemic that has so far claimed the lives of nearly 1600 Africans in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and DR Congo, and thus wants the African Union to take the matter to the UN Security Council for debate and investigation.

A group of African academics in France has even launched a signature campaign on the Internet aimed at collecting one million signatures to include in a petition to the African Union to set up, in collaboration with the UN Security Council, an international commission of inquiry to investigate the origins of both Ebola and HIV-Aids. The Africans do not accept the publicised explanations of the likely cause or causes of the current Ebola epidemic. They think there is more to the current outbreak than Africa and the world have been told.

Dr F.I.D. Konotey-Ahulu, a Ghanaian doctor of high repute and many years of experience, and an African patriot to booth, is one of the many concerned Africans who want the AU to take the Ebola case more seriously.

In an Internet debate with fellow Ghanaian doctors last week, Dr Konotey-Ahulu, who has been based in the UK for many years, reminded Africans of the “two American presidents, both alive today, (who) have both apologised to the world (and you can Google ‘President Clinton’s Apology’ and ‘President Obama’s Apology’) regarding unethical things that American scientists had done to black people in Tuskegee, and in Guatemala. Their apologies effectively shut the mouths of those who were shouting ‘conspiracy theories!’, conspiracy theories!’ But both presidents admitted to conspiracy facts!”
Dr Konotey-Ahulu went on: “But there were no African journalists of the mettle of Cameron Duodu to simply mention in their national newspapers the apologies of these much maligned presidents.
Had their apologies been given the publicity they deserved in Ghana, at least we would have been alerted to examining all foreign research in Ghana.”

Dr Konotey-Ahulu reminded his audience of “Professor Bella Ringelhann, a white man working at Korle Bu (Teaching Hospital in Accra, who) protested in the British Medical Journal, about certain aspects of research by foreigners (himself a foreigner), but by doing that he promptly lost his European friends, and was dismissed as a Hungarian Communist, never mind that he had fled Budapest because of the Russian invasion. He gave certain guidelines to our Ministry of Health to buttress us in Ghana against exploitative medical research. His advice was simply filed . . .” Dr Konotey-Ahulu continued: “How do we tell the Ghana government to trust Ghanaian talent at home and abroad to scrutinise researchers who offer their services even free of charge?

“Who will look these researchers straight in the eye and turn to officials of our Ministry of Health and universities and tell them: ‘Hei Ghanani, Equo ne credite! Quid quid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’ (Hei, Fellow Ghanaians, do not trust the horse (or research funds). Whatever is offered, I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts’? “Who will tell our Ministry of Health and research institutions, ‘Hei, be careful, we don’t want Ebola and/or Lassa Fever laboratories in our country?

“ . . . Should the Ghana College of Physicians & Surgeons that is entrusted with policing Ghana’s health not be asking: ‘Are we right to be dismissing suspicions of inimical research on Africans as conspiracy theories when two American presidents have confessed to conspiracy facts?’

“How seriously should Ghanaian experts take these things?”

The debate
Dr Konotey-Ahulu was supporting a submission by the veteran Ghanaian journalist, Cameron Duodu, also based in the UK for many years, who has been writing some passionate blogs in the past week urging the African Union to take the Ebola case to the UN Security Council with the aim of pressing the American government to come clean on the cause or causes of the current Ebola outbreak.
A brilliant journalist of nearly 60 years practice, Duodu is aware that, as he put it, “there are scientists who, for money, prestige or ‘patriotic’ reasons, will use human beings to carry out research to hurt or kill humans. Notable among these is Dr Wouter Basson, (aka Dr Death), who developed bio-chemical weapons for the apartheid regime of South Africa, some of which were meant to kill only Africans.
“Scientists with a similarly racist mentality also surfaced in the United States, where in 1972, it was revealed that a group at the Tuskegee Institute had, for decades, been using poor African-American share-croppers to test drugs against the terrible disease of syphilis.

“Anyone aware of what some scientists can do will be remiss in not asking: since it is reported that some in the scientific community are suggesting that the current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia may have originated from ‘a toddler’ who ate an infected bat and got infected with the Ebola virus, why had bats waited until 2014 to transmit the disease to humans, when Africans had mercilessly been putting bats — and other game animals — on their menu, for ever?

“Another question is this: since scientists from Tulane University, in New Orleans, USA, had been carrying out research for about 10 years in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, into haemorrhagic fevers, including Lassa and Ebola, why has no-one officially associated the research they were carrying out with the current Ebola outbreak?”

Trouble, trouble
According to Duodu, the only (indirect) indication that something may have gone amiss with the Tulane University research in the three countries under attack by Ebola has come from a Reuters report on August 7 about the US government stopping its funding of the research.
The Reuters report said the US government “will not renew funding for a major research project into Lassa fever” in the three countries, “a decision that will, in turn, cut resources for a facility in Sierra Leone that is at the forefront of the current battle against the Ebola virus.

“The National Institutes of Health rejected a proposal from New Orleans-based Tulane University to renew the five-year contract, which expires in November, according to a July 30 letter from the NIH reviewed by Reuters. The expiring contract is worth $15 million.”

Reuters added: “The facility, at Kenema Government Hospital, was set up a decade ago to test and treat Lassa fever. Now it is being used to treat patients stricken with Ebola . . . ” The project “also spends $100 000 a year on a laboratory in Irrua, southern Nigeria. The lab diagnosed the first case of Ebola in that country. It is not currently treating any patients”.

The most serious aspect of the Reuters report was contained in the following paragraphs: “As part of the Tulane research project, which was designed to identify diagnostics and treatment for Lassa, researchers support the Kenema facility which has a 5 500 square foot laboratory and similarly-sized hospital ward. Blood samples from infected patients are used to develop tests and diagnostics.
“In the letter to Tulane, a contracting officer for the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Liem Nguyen, said the proposal had been rejected “based on technical factors, scientific priority, and availability of funds.” “The proposal,” the letter added, “falls short of those considered by NIAID to offer the best opportunities for the most successful accomplishment of the acquisition objectives.” And then this: According to Reuters: “The Sierra Leone facility’s resources are strained, members of Tulane’s team say. Dr Daniel Bausch, an associate professor in Tulane’s tropical medicine department, who was at the facility for three weeks in July, said last week that constant fatigue among overworked and poorly trained workers may have led to mistakes.”

Mistakes? What mistakes?! Could the “mistakes” have led to the current outbreak of Ebola? And why is nobody considering the US Government-funded research in Sierra Leone as a possible cause of the current epidemic? Dr Bausch was quoted by Reuters as saying that he saw some staff not wearing protective suits. The number of patients in the ward has topped 50, far outstripping its capacity.”
Dr Bausch’s revelations forced Cameron Duodu to say: “Now, I am constrained to ask: is it unreasonable to suspect that the US Government now wants, for reasons best known to itself, to dissociate itself from the (10-year) research in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia? Does it know something it is not prepared to share with the rest of the world? “I ask these questions because it seems to be extremely callous of the US Government to be cutting off funds from a research project it has hitherto been happily funding, at a crucial time when the facility’s efforts are most in demand! If research into diseases like Ebola is not a ‘scientific priority’ now, as the NIH claims, then when will it be?

“Even if it was really done for budgetary reasons alone, does the US Government not realise that the timing of the announcement on funding can give rise to the worst forms of speculation, to say the least?”

We’ve seen it all before
Thank God I have been away from London, on holiday, while the Ebola brouhaha has been running. For many years, I took it upon myself, as a concerned African journalist and editor of the London-based New African magazine, to closely follow the debate on the origins of HIV-Aids and I tried my dandiest to conscientise Africans not to meekly accept the orthodox view that the HIV virus jumped from an African green monkey into humans, especially after the Americans had tried unsuccessfully to pin the blame of the origins of the HIV virus on Haiti. I was called every name under the sun by people opposed to my opinion who never stopped to ask themselves how a “disease” that started in gays in San Francisco, USA, initially called Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), came to originate in African green monkeys that had been eaten by an African in the Congo bush.

Yes, some Africans eat green monkeys and they have been doing so since Adam. But until very recently, being gay was not one of the pursuits of Africans, certainly not those who eat green monkeys in the Congo bush! So how did GRID, a gay disease in San Francisco (which was later renamed AIDS) happen to originate in green monkeys in the Congo bush?
And why did the African ancestors in the Congo bush who had gorged themselves on green monkeys for thousands of years before 1980, never ever contracted GRID?

Amazingly, the Ebola virus like the HIV virus, is said to have originated in the same Congo bush. Ebola is the name of the river near the place in DRCongo where the virus is said to have been first isolated by European and American scientists in 1976. So what is it that makes the Congo bush such a fertile breeding ground of dangerous viruses?
The truth nobody wants to face is that DRCongo, with its massive size, is larger than 14 European countries (including all the largest countries there are in Europe) put together. Thus, any scientist bent on mischief can quietly enter the Congo forest and do whatever he wants without ever being detected, and when his mischief blows up in disease epidemics, fanciful theories are advanced about green monkeys who give dangerous diseases to humans.
These are the same green monkeys that the ancestors ate. They are the same green monkeys that generations and generations after the ancestors have eaten and continue to eat. Now the same green monkeys give dangerous diseases to humans! And Africans believe it!

How AIDS started
Yet the same Africans would not believe, or at least take it seriously, that in 1970 an agency of the US government, fearing that the Soviets would be the first to acquire “an organism that does not naturally exist, but which will affect the immune system”, as part of their germ warfare arsenal, went to Congress and asked the Congressional Appropriations Committee to give the agency $10m to research and create “an organism that does not naturally exist, but which will affect the immune system”.

The agency promised Congress that it would be able to create such an organism in 10 years time — i.e, 10 years from 1970. Like clockwork, “an organism that does not naturally exist, but which will affect the immune system” started affecting the immune system of gays in San Francisco in 1980, precisely 10 years from when the agency got the funding from the Congressional Appropriations Committee.
That was the “disease” called GRID that was first diagnosed in gays in San Franscisco in 1980, which was later renamed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which was later said to have originated in African green monkeys.

Before anybody called me a “conspiracy theorist”, I would like to direct enquirers to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. There, they will find the documentation on the US$10m grant that the Congressional Appropriations Committee made to the agency for the research into the “organism that does not naturally exist, but which will affect the immune system”.
We published a facsimile copy of the documentation in New African magazine in the early 1990s.

Why the Americans are running away
Now in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia where a 10-year American university research into haemorrhagic fevers, including Lassa and Ebola, have been going on supported by American government money and the American Army; where Dr Daniel Bausch, an associate professor in Tulane’s tropical medicine department, the university in New Orleans that has been conducting the Lassa Fever and Ebola research, says “constant fatigue among overworked and poorly trained workers may have led to mistakes”, we are told by officialdom that a fruit bat and “a toddler” are responsible for the current outbreak of Ebola.

My dictionary defines a “toddler” as “a young child who is just beginning to walk”. If that is accepted as a universal definition of a toddler, then how in hell did this “young child who is just beginning to walk” able to lay his hands on a fruit bat that caused the current epidemic of Ebola?

Fruit bats are fast flyers and they don’t walk on the ground. They hang in trees or in crevices or on ceilings of disused or abandoned buildings. Unless this “toddler” was five feet tall and above at the time when he was just beginning to walk, then the theory of the bat and the toddler is just as fanciful as the one that said green monkeys gave the world AIDS! The peddlers of the fanciful theories will never associate the “mistakes” of the American research in Sierra Leone that Dr Bausch talks about, or even the desire by the Canadian company working with Tulane University in the development of the anti-Ebola drug, or other such Western companies, who are at the level of testing their drugs on human beings?

Last week I reported in this column that: Biomedical researchers working for the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and partly funded by the US Department of Defence’s Joint Project Manager-Transformational Medical Technologies (JPM-TMT), have been developing preventative and curative drugs to combat any possible bioterror threat from Ebola Virus Disease and other viruses.

One leading candidate is TKM Ebola, an anti-Ebola viral therapeutic, developed by the Canadian pharmaceutical company, Tekmira, under a contract with JPM-TMT.
TKM-Ebola has shown a 100% success rate in monkeys. Back in mid-January 2014, Tekmira announced that it had dosed the first subject in a Phase One human clinical trial of TKM-Ebola. The study was meant to evaluate the safety, determination of a safe dosage range, and identify any possible side effects as TKM-Ebola is absorbed in the body of healthy adult subjects.

Tekmira expects to complete the Phase One clinical study later this year, and some scientists see the current Ebola outbreak as a unique opportunity to greatly advance the search for a cure. The vaccine will be stockpiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for use in emergencies. But already, the WHO has allowed TKM-Ebola to be used on victims of the current epidemic in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.

Doing the sums
The mathematics of the desire by Tekmira to develop the Ebola drug is not difficult to calculate. The company needs to test the drug on human beings, but it is difficult to get human volunteers for such a test.

So what better way to get “human volunteers” than some mischievous researcher entering the Parrots Beak, the dense rainforest where the borders of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia meet, release the virus there, and see how easily “human volunteers” would pop up from the forests to be “saved” by the untested drug — precisely as the WHO allowed it to be used on the victims of the current Ebola outbreak!

But, wait for this: On 21 August, Newsweek magazine did a front cover story on the likely cause of the current Ebola epidemic, and never once mentioned the University of Tulane’s 10-year research into Lassa and Ebola in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia paid for by the US Government.

Rather, Newsweek blamed the current outbreak of Ebola on “bushmeat”, which it claimed might cause a major Ebola epidemic in the US if West Africans were not stopped from bringing bushmeat into the country.”

According to the Newsweek article, headlined “Smuggled bushmeat is Ebola’s back door to America”: “Bushmeat may be a luxury, but it may also pose a deadly threat. A memo obtained by Newsweek that circulated among customs officers and agriculture specialists in 2007 noted that bushmeat is “a potential vector of diseases such as Monkeypox, Ebola Virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and other communicable diseases.”

Today, “while the focus remains on the passengers of trans-Atlantic flights”, the Newsweek article said, “there is an additional risk — all but ignored by the popular press and public — lurking in the cargo hold below: bushmeat contaminated with the virus and smuggled into the US in luggage.

“New York City, home to nearly 77 000 West Africans (most of them in the Bronx), is the epicenter of the bushmeat trade in the US “Smuggling continues to grow because bushmeat is prized, and increasingly valuable. According to a 2002 congressional hearing, the total value of the bushmeat trade had “reached the staggering level of more than US$50 million annually and potentially could grow to hundreds of millions of dollars in the next two decades.”

After saying all that, the Newsweek article yet admitted that: “Though researchers cannot identify with absolute certainty the cause of the current Ebola outbreak, they do know the strain of virus, while being similar to the Zaire strain, is indigenous to Guinea, suggesting bushmeat was the source.

“Smoked bushmeat may appear safe, but the flesh inside is still juicy — filled with blood, fresh tissue and more: Simian foamy virus and herpes viruses showed up in the samples of the confiscated meats. The researchers didn’t find Ebola, but they tested only a few samples.” Newsweek continued: “In the Bronx and other parts of the city with large enclaves of West African immigrants, Newsweek could not find bushmeat for sale. Targeting small merchants, however, will not stem the illegal bushmeat trade or the potential spread of diseases like Ebola.

“Instead, the commercial trade in Africa must be curbed, which will require greater action and cooperation from African governments and increased international efforts — a daunting task, considering how popular bushmeat is on the continent.”

Fresh nonsense
This is what we call in Ghana “fresh nonsense”. Newsweek’s scare-mongering and its efforts to divert attention from the most likely cause of the current outbreak of Ebola was so embarrassing that fellow American writers, Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne, of The Washington Post felt obliged to denounce it, calling it “irresponsible”.

They wrote on August 25: “There is virtually no chance that bushmeat smuggling could bring Ebola to America. The term (bushmeat) is a catchall for non-domesticated animals consumed as a protein source; anyone who hunts deer and then consumes their catch as venison in the United States is eating bushmeat without calling it that.”

Regarding the word “bushmeat”, the two writers said, “why don’t we just call it ‘wild game’, the same term we use for non-domesticated animals sometimes hunted and consumed in the United States – some of which has also been known to threaten human handlers with disease (e.g. deer, elk, armadillos, rabbit, etc). “Moreover, the current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption.

No scientist claims to have conclusive evidence substantiating the pathway through which Ebola crosses from animals to humans.” So there you have it, dear reader. An American hunter kills a deer in the woods, skins it, cooks it, and eats it. That is not “bushmeat”, it is “wild game”. An African hunter kills a deer in the rainforest, skins it, cooks it, and eats it. That is called “bushmeat” which, according to Newsweek, harbours dangerous viruses and diseases, including Ebola!
Fresh nonsense knows no borders indeed!
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