A virus in a medical desert

In the early months of 2014, a team of medical professionals from the global health organisation Doctors Without Borders began tracking a troubling outbreak, centred in Guéckédou, a city of 200,000 in southern Guinea near the country’s borders with Liberia and Sierra Leone. The affliction had cholera-like symptoms, and seemed unusually lethal. Blood samples were dispatched to France on an overnight flight and on March 21, a team of virologists in Lyon identified the killer: Zaire Ebola.

In July of that year, the medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer learned that his friend Humarr Khan, one of the leading infectious disease