The recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic in the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone claimed the lives of slightly over eleven thousand victims by June 2015. Focusing on Sierra Leone, this article argues that the Ebola outbreak cannot be divorced from larger and chronic issues of poverty, economic inequality, and social injustice that have been the bane of the country's stunted development in its postcolonial existence since 1961. Drawing on current historical literature on epidemiology in Africa, media reports, documents from the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international agencies such as Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF), and testimonies from Sierra Leoneans, the article aims to historicize and situate the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone within a wider context of poverty and related issues of economic inequity and social inequality.
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