The international community has failed to deal with the deadly Ebola virus because it mainly kills poor Africans, Britain’s top public health doctor has claimed.
Dr John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, compared the situation to the early years of the AIDS epidemic and attacked the “moral bankruptcy” of a system which gives drug companies no reason to invest in treatments for “powerless minority groups”.
Writing in the Independent on Sunday, he said: “We must respond to this emergency as if it was in Kensington, Chelsea, and Westminster. And we must ‘get real’ over economic development.
“We must also tackle the scandal of the unwillingness of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in research to produce treatments and vaccines, something they refuse to do because the numbers involved are, in their terms, so small and don´t justify the investment.