John Snow for the Ebola era

Here’s a very important point:

It’s impossible to treat an epidemic when you know next to nothing about the population it’s ravaging.

Just thought I’d plonk this here for your reading delectation. It’s a good starting point as to how the principles of John Snow and the Broad Street pump are still relevant and how they can be applied to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and also how and why that’s not happening.
The piece itself is unremarkable, but the sum of its parts and all that…

It’s an instance where the gloss of digital ubiquity hides our lack of real understanding. Where technological solutionism masks the fact that nothing has been solved.

A lesson for us all in how technological Utopianism isn’t always quite the flawless answer to everything. There’s a lesson for SA’s TB diagnostic progamme in there too, but I’m wholly unwilling to elaborate on that bit.

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