KEYWORDS | By Christopher Mims
Outside the rural Guinean village where the current Ebola
outbreak apparently began, a pictographic billboard illustrates how
to avoid the disease. This is--along with radio, which remains an
important source of news for people in West Africa--the state of
the art for reaching mostly illiterate villagers.
Contrast Guinea with Nigeria, which despite 19 diagnosed cases
of Ebola beginning in July, is now free of the disease. Nigeria has
almost six times the GDP per capita of Guinea, and more resources
always helps when the best way to stop the spread of a disease is
quarantine and vigilance by medical professionals.
But Nigeria had another tool Guinea lacks: cellphone companies
that were willing to give up the call-data records of some of the
infected patients. Almost all cell carriers know where the phones
they service are at all times, to varying degrees of spatial
resolution. When you need to know where someone has been in the
past month--to determine every person with whom they have been in
contact--there is no better way than to track his or her
cellphone.
Ivory Coast, richer still than Nigeria and so far Ebola-free, is
capitalizing on the mobile connectivity of its citizens by sending
out millions of mass text messages warning about the dangers of
Ebola and how to avoid catching it. Smartphone penetration is still
low in Africa relative to the rest of the world--in Ivory Coast
around 25% of all mobile phones are smartphones, while 90% of
households have access to a mobile phone.
I asked Nnenna Nwakanma, a resident of Ivory Coast whose work at
the World Wide Web Foundation focuses on making Internet access
more affordable, whether access to the mobile Internet--pretty much
the only kind there is in most of Africa--could have an impact on
the spread of Ebola. She was unequivocal. "For us in Africa,
connectivity is a life and death issue," she said.
Researchers I spoke to were more specific.
Linus Bengtsson, creator of software called Flowminder, which
provides maps of travel patterns in affected areas, said more
phones and more connectivity would improve his models of where
Ebola could pop up next. Emmanuel Letouzé, director of the Data-Pop
Alliance, which uses data to aid recovery from natural disasters,
said the better data that would follow from more phones and more
connectivity would allow researchers to determine which kinds of
public interventions and communications work best to slow the
spread of an epidemic.
In Sierra Leone, a system called Tera has been used by the
American Red Cross to send text messages to every cellphone in
areas at risk for Ebola. If you've ever received an Amber Alert
about a missing child on your smartphone you've experienced
something akin to what cellphone users in West Africa are now
receiving.
And the more sophisticated the phone, the better--smartphones
with multiple radios, such as Wi-Fi and GPS in addition to
cellular, are much better at identifying their precise location
than simple feature phones. Smartphones also give their users more
channels through which to receive news about outbreaks, such as
access to the BBC's Ebola news service via the Facebook-owned chat
app WhatsApp.
Here's where Google and Facebook, and more important the
nonprofits they sponsor, come in. The Alliance for Affordable
Internet, of which Google is a primary sponsor, works on breaking
down policy and regulatory barriers to affordable Internet
access.
In Nigeria the average smartphone user has to spend 13% of his
or her monthly salary for 500 megabytes of data a day. The same
amount of data in Liberia, one of the three countries hit hard by
Ebola, would cost more than the average person's monthly salary.
The story is much the same in Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Facebook's nonprofit Internet.org has goals similar to the
Alliance for Affordable Internet, but Facebook and Google aren't
relying solely on local operators to solve the problem of how to
connect the five billion people who aren't online. Google is
experimenting with low-flying balloons that would act as cell
towers in the sky, and Facebook is working on giant solar-powered
drones that would accomplish the same.
Both of these efforts have been greeted with some cynicism by
critics in the West--can we trust companies that are reliant for
their growth on getting more people online to do so in a way that
isn't mostly about their bottom line?
But in the poorest countries in Africa, where people simply
cannot afford connectivity of any kind, and where 10,000 cases of
Ebola have just been confirmed by World Health Organization, which
company reaps profits from bringing more people online seems
morally insignificant next to the possibility that doing so will
help stop the spread of future outbreaks of Ebola and other
diseases.
Thus when Mark Zuckerberg declares connectivity to be a "human
right," I don't find him the least bit disingenuous. Getting people
online is an imperative--and if it means Facebook profits from it,
so be it.
It is important to remember that Ebola, which scientists believe
emerged 20 million years ago, is going to come back again and
again. Because of its great age, experts say it may even have
cousins, other lethal viruses just waiting to make the jump to
humans. And malaria, which epidemiologists have also had success in
fighting with better information gathering and dissemination tools,
still kills more than 600,000 people a year.
If we want to stop the next pandemic, connecting the world's
poorest to the most effective communication method ever invented is
a good place to start.
Follow Christopher Mims on Twitter
@Mims
and write to him at
christopher.mims@wsj.com
.
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