Spare us a Bob?

Anyone listening to the BBC this week could be forgiven for thinking that the musician Bob Geldof had just emerged from Africa, like a latter-day Dr Livingstone, the first westerner with news of a deadly new virus. He and his makeshift band of celebrities have adopted Ebola, their song blazing from the radio while Geldof himself has been in every studio exhorting people, with his usual stream of expletives, to buy it.

Unless you have been in isolation for the past six months, the Band Aid single will not have raised your awareness of the disease one bit. Since the outbreak was first confirmed in Guinea on 22 March, many hours of news coverage had been broadcast and many millions raised to help the aid effort. Few have noted that diarrhoea has killed 73 times as many Africans as Ebola since the disease broke out. We can treat diarrhoea far more easily, though no celebrity in their right mind would sing a Christmas song about it.