The health minister of Mali confirms that the West African country is now dealing with its first case of Ebola.  The patient is a two-year old girl who had come from neighboring Guinea, and brought to hospital in the Malian town of Kayes.  That’s where workers took a blood sample and confirmed that the girl is Ebola positive.

The UN World Health Organization says at least 4,877 people have died in the West African Ebola Epidemic, although the true toll could be much higher.  The vast majority of cases occurred in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.  It was in the latter nation that 33-year old Dr. Craig Spencer worked with Medecins Sans Frontieres to treat Ebola patients.

Dr. Spencer returned home to New York City on 14 October, but began to feel sluggish on Wednesday – by Thursday morning, had developed a 103 F degree fever.  He called MSF, who called New York City health officials.  An emergency team in full protective suits came out to his apartment near the Hudson River in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood, and transported him to the isolation unit in New York’s Bellevue Hospital.  Earlier reports indicated that test results were expected early Friday morning, local time, but American news networks on Thursday night said the tests were positive for the Ebola virus.  A further test will be conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control to confirm the initial round.

That Spencer was even in Africa at all is a failure of the paradigm that puts corporate profits over medicine and healing people.  Almost a decade ago, Canadian and American scientists published their research into a promising vaccine that proved effective in protecting monkeys against Ebola.  The researchers believed that the vaccine would have been ready for licensing by 2010 or 2011.

No pharmaceutical company took it up.  There was no profit in sinking money into developing a vaccine for a disease that appears in impoverished nations that can’t pay for it.