Ebola – Before this site turns into a conspiracy hotbed.

It looks like a lot of contributors here have decided to turn ebola or any commutable diseases that any western countries get involved with into conspiracy theory. As much as this lace allows for free speech, I think we should be careful not to keep passing across our ignorance in guise of sarcasm or outright outlandish claims.
This is sad because it is the same situation that is happening in Northern Nigeria where Polio – already eradicated worldwide - is making a come back. That doesn’t mean some of the pharmaceutical industries don’t do some bad things but it make sense to go with the rational first before spewing the conspiracy theory at every turn.
I read in some of the posted thread why the serum that was used in treating the American health workers were “secret”. And of course the conspiracy theory started festering from there. What the poster didn’t understand is the way drugs are being developed in the west- mostly in the United States.
Ebola was first discovered in 1976. That is 38 years ago. No African companies tried to develop anything to contain the disease. The disease has been making a stronger comeback in a couple of years and you bet with Globalization, it is a matter of time before it gets to the west. That makes it a prime disease for some pharmaceutical to bet on. It is “secret” because you don’t want your competitors to know about it until you are ready to unveil it. It is the nature of the beast in a competitive drug market. To even use it on human am sure the FDA had to approve of it and of course the patients signed waivers. The drug has to go through an extensive FDA approval before it can hit the market. Until the drug is patented, it is opened for someone to steal it. So the company has to protect their intellectual property.
That it has been used now on human put them out there and actually helped them in their research.

Could Ebola have been a man-made virus? Possibly! I bet we could have said small pox or chicken pox, bubonic plague and those other diseases that had wiped out some of the humanity were human made, if they had happened now. My take about some of these diseases is that they mutated over a period.
There has been a lot of disease that killed people in Africa that we don’t talk about. We are so superstitious that when someone dies we don’t even let people know what killed them. It took Olikoye Ransome-Kuti to announce that Fela died of AIDS in 98 for some people to wanting to believe AIDS is real. Some people even lampooned him for saying such “disgraceful” thing about Fela.
My point here is, people have been eating animals for ages, that you don’t know they contacted a disease from that animals they eat doesn’t mean they never did. Because if they die of the disease, we have perfect reasons why they die – Like some witch did it or his enemy caused it etc – that we have refused to look at the medical angle.