In west Africa today, as in early 20th-century Manchuria or England at the time of the Black Death, travellers are often unwelcome. When eight healthcare workers and journalists showed up at a village near Guinea’s second city of Nzerekore in September, they planned to explain how to protect against the Ebola virus that has killed at least 4,500 people this year. Instead they were set upon by locals wielding machetes and clubs. Some of the visitors’ bodies were later found in the village latrine.
Joseph Fair, an American virologist who worked in the region in 2004, says the villagers – fearful of Ebola, witchcraft and unknown foreigners “showing up in space suits” – were trying to cut themselves off from the outside world. Self-isolation has been tried before, and sometimes it works. In 1910, as plague was spreading across the mountainous region of northeast China, several towns barred entry to outsiders. Reliable men were deputised to travel to market and return swiftly carrying essential supplies. Pneumonic plague claimed perhaps 60,000 lives in Manchuria that year. But the closed off villages stayed free of the disease.
The bacteria that cause plague can travel through the air or be passed on in the bite of an infected flea. Ebola is less contagious and therefore less deadly, but there are haunting similarities all the same. Ebola’s long incubation period allows patients to flee outbreaks while still healthy. Plague strikes faster, but it is what bacteriologists call a “stealth infection” – victims feel quite well while the illness silently devastates their bodies. As Giovanni Boccaccio, the Renaissance poet, put it, men ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise. A victim might ride for three days before dying. Both diseases thrive on fear and flight.