The Politics and Policy of Ebola

Abstract

It was a dark and stormy night in mid October in Boone, North Carolina. I was late for a gumbo dinner that my co-editor was hosting at his house in honor of a visit to the area by Barbara Walthall, the managing editor for PS. Wind gusts exceeding 50 mph were forecast, and rain was coming down in sheets. I wasn’t quite sure the mountainside wouldn’t wash down on me before I got to Phillip’s house. “Too bad for Barbara,” I thought, “she missed the fall colors by just one day.” A radio program on the Ebola crisis in western Africa distracted my attention. The reporter was profi ling a health-care worker who wanted to volunteer for service in the area, but her application had been delayed for weeks while she was shuttled back and forth between government and nongovernmental organizations, her application was processed and reprocessed, and even after she was approved, she was told that she could not be deployed for at least a month. The thrust of the story was clear: the listener was supposed to be outraged that bureaucratic incompetence and delay would only exacerbate what had already become the most severe international public health crisis in memory. Instead, my editorial antenna kicked in, and it struck me that political scientists might react very diff erently to this health-care worker’s tale of woe. Recruiting, training, and deploying personnel to a rapidly changing crisis zone with severe infrastructure challenges and located thousands of miles away is a highly sophisticated dance. Yet completing this task in only four weeks struck me as quite impressive. I wondered if my colleagues would agree with me. That evening, I pitched the idea of a “Spotlight” on Ebola to Phillip, Barbara, and Celina, our editorial assistant. We agreed on a possible timeline, and I agreed to try to identify some potential contributors. The eff ort began the next day, and one of the names that I kept encountering was Ruxandra Paul, a recent PhD and a college fellow at Harvard University who works on issues of markets and international migration. Ruxandra graciously agreed to pen an essay quickly. Fast forward a few days after the eff ort had begun. A missive from Ken Sherrill, emeritus professor at Hunter College was sent to Steven Rathgeb Smith, the executive director of APSA, with the requisite long list of additional receipient addresses. Citing his own coauthored article on political science and AIDS written 22 years ago with Robert Bailey and Carolyn Somerville (1992) (we are academics after all!), Professor Sherrill asked: