|
Tayo Fagbule |
The outbreak of terrorism in northeast
Nigeria is a tempting metaphor for the outbreak of the Ebola virus. David
Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency and counterterrorism expert, uses this analogy
between medicine and insurgency in a 2009 paper Terrain, Tribes and Terrorists:
Pakistan, 2006-2008.
The stages of an infectious disease include
incubation, pre-eruptive, infectious and recovery. Developing an optimal
control strategy depends on relative infectiousness in the pre-eruptive and
infectious stage. Kilcullen lists four phases: infection, contagion,
intervention and rejection.
When an agent (a pathogen e.g. a virus or
bacterium) invades the body the disease is considered infectious; if easily
transmitted from person to person it is contagious – 25 percent of the deaths in
the world are caused by infectious diseases.